John VanSickle <evi### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> For animations this is a show-stopper.  Picture quality *must* be
> consistent from frame to frame, and that rules out any perceptible
> degree of graininess.

I think you can have Maxwell (at least, don't know about the others) cut off
when a selected noise level is reached. Animations are possible, but I would
think the main reason against them would be the crippling render times. When
one frame can take hours to render, it's really not practical:

http://www.maxwellrender.com/img/gallery/videos/promotional/whentheyfall.mov

The noise seems to be at a consistent level in that.

> in their docs they say that the only real drawback to
> ray-tracing is the requirement that the entire scene be containable in
> memory

In RAM, they mean? If so, I don't think that can be correct (or up to date);
look for Ingo Wald's work on out-of-core (and realtime) raytracing. I think
they must have some use for raytracing or they wouldn't have bothered adding it
to PRMan 11. Apart from OpenRT, which supports this as a matter of course,
there's also

graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/Publications/2004/Boeing_EGSR2004.ppt

which describes the challenges to raytracing when rendering a 350-million
triangle model realtime (35-70GB of data, apparently).

Tom

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