Christian Froeschlin <chr### [at] chrfrde> wrote:
> > BTW, I think one of the things to pay attention to in a next-generation POV
> > version (i.e. 4.0) is to use lighting-model-independent descriptions of
> > material properties, which each lighting model must then try to map to its own
> > parameters as best as it can.
>
> Sounds cool, but how would you describe any part of the texture in
> a lighting-model-independent description? The best you could do is
> to define a model as generic as possible (similar to the LightSys
> includes?), and derive parameters for simpler lighting models from
> there (as done by macros in LightSys). Having this built-in might
> someday allow things such as more realistic photons taking the
> actual light source spectrum into account.

Okay, maybe I'm a bit too optimistic about this.

However, some stuff in POV's current texture parameter set is redundant: We have
a roughness parameter for phong highlights, another one for specular, yet
another one for MC-Pov's blurred reflections, and yet other people use normal
parameters to define roughness in order to get blurred reflections.

This is because so far, POV has gone the approach to supply separate parameters
for each and every single lighting model out there, which makes it extremely
difficult to move from one lighting mode to the other. I see that as a
drawback.

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