"Gilles Tran" <gitran_nospam_@wanadoo.fr> wrote:

> The area_illumination feature that Warp introduced in the latest 3.7 beta is
> one of those things that the previous versions couldn't do: of course one
> could simulate it with grids of point lights, but it was just too
> impractical for common usage. Another feature that is sorely missing is
> efficient blurred reflection. There's a trick to do that in POV but the
> results are usable in only certain (limited) circumstances.

This is exactly what I don't like in POV. You can't just throw a scene to it and
let it render it accurately. You have to enable many kind of features and you
have to guess which features your scene actually needs. POV can't decide it for
you.

This is a problem both for developers and users. Developers have to implement
many special cases and tricks to get the desired effect. Brute force renderers
don't need them because many lighting effects are "automatically" generated.
With brute force you don't need area_illumination kind of keywords. You can use
any kind of light source and the result is always correct.

The same goes with blurred reflections. It is not too difficult to have any kind
of BRDF and the result is still properly antialiased etc. No need to have
special tricks to mimic blurred reflections. But I will verify this statement
when I have implemented them myself...

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