Dearmad <dea### [at] europacom> wrote in article
<36802421.396A7829@europa.com>...
> Hello Xander,
> ...
> 
> Is this a plugin for MORAY or something to do with your new version of
> Polyray or what?  More info, sil vous plais.

Both.  All rendering is performed by a Windows DLL, which can be used by
pretty much any Windows program (or DOS console program under Windows '9x
or NT).  I've tested it with C++, Delphi, and Java (works with JDK 1.1 and
up, not with MS J++).

The attachment to Moray is through a plugin DLL that walks through the
Moray scene and creates the appropriate primitives within the renderer. 
The simulation of textures is also performed by the plugin DLL, and are
provided to the renderer as callback functions.

Solid noise textures won't look exactly like what you get from POV-Ray. 
Since I didn't want to use any POV-Ray code (which would be quite
improper), the noise function will put it's features in slightly different
places.  The overall look is quite similar though.  

In general my renderer is faster than POV-Ray 3.1a (the Windows version
anyway, I haven't been using any others, so I can't really judge).  Not by
huge amounts, in general it's only 10-25% faster (in raytracing mode), with
certain kinds of scenes being slower.  For quick previews of your scene
using zbuffer/scanline, it is generally much faster (complex textures can
slow that down though).  The big exception is blobs - I need to code a
quicker tesselator.

The only significant things that aren't yet in the plugin are media and
radiosity.  I haven't quite figured out how to translate POV-Ray/Moray's
media into the renderers hypertexture - they are very close in what they
do.  The method POV-Ray uses for radiosity (which is based on Greg Ward's
work) would be easy to implement, but isn't as easy to get good results as
a more traditional polygon based hierarchical radiosity.

> 
> If it's for MORAY will it work with the new test version Lutz is going
> to have up?  I registered 2.x MORAY but have yet to register any later
> version as the improvements haven't helped me much and now without
> texture previews, I'm really left in the dark.  Maybe its time to write
> a simple C++ program to do this for me in more than 256 colors anyway...

Yes, it works with version 3.1 (the one being released now).  I think you
will want to get hold of this version.  It is a really nice step forward -
the inverse kinematics is a pretty incredible feature for a sub $100
modeller.

When using this plugin, the texture preview still isn't using Polyray (ask
Lutz to add this to the plugin architecture - he only adds features that
people consider high priorities).  However, it's not as big a deal because
a) I've got the textures pretty well matching POV-Ray, so you can expect to
see what you get if you have POV-Ray making the preview; b) if you make a
couple of simple scenes of sphere/cube/... you can have the texture editor
open and repeatedly render the scene as you change parameters - this will
result in a bunch of windows open that show what the texture looks like for
each of those settings.

Xander

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