"Grassblade" <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> "Gilles Tran" <gil### [at] agroparistechfr> wrote:
>
> > For instance, Maxwell has a feature
> > where one can change the lighting setup *** after *** rendering so that one
> > can test various lighting situations in real time.

ah!  so that is what that Flash intro is all about...

I wonder if that has anything to do with it being unbiased or, more likely,
with High Dynamic Range or caching mechanisms...

> > That's really something worth investigating for POV-Ray 4. IMHO this is
> > much, much more important than SDL.

povray's SDL is the main feature that povray has to offer me.  There are far
better/faster renderers out there, some with lots more features and
workforce.  None has the simplicity and expressiveness of povray's SDL
format.

I really, really wanted to go the Renderman way, but RIB is unbearably
annoying and C/C++ for modelling is overkill...

> You are raising quite a good point. I do not know how it is done either, but
> the way I’d do it is to save all of the info in separate places, much
> like layers in 2d editing. So, store ray-object intersection in the bottom
> layer, then pigment on another, normals on yet another, light on a fourth
> etc. Currently POV outputs the “flattened” picture, but if it
> returned the various elements instead, or simply gave access to them, one
> could try some weird effects very easily (for example swapping the normals
> layer with ambient layer).

interesting.

> *Wakes up* :-/
>
> Still, a beautiful dream.

in order to turn into reality, we need developers, a roadmap and plenty of
algorithms... a benevolent dictator for life wouldn't do bad, either... :)

and a good-looking SDL as well! :D

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