This sounds like a really exciting project!  I hope you succeed.

One request.  When you are done, those of us who don't have the necessary
compilers to compile POV-Ray (and can't afford the hundreds of $$$ to get
one to do just this compile), would really appreciate your making a copy of
the executable (in my case for Win98/NT4.0) available with the patch.  This
is not the case with Daren's dispersion patch (and I don't know how many
others) and the lack of an executable has kept me for using that capability.

Thanks and good luck!

Jim


Nathan Kopp wrote in message <3669F93E.B9FDC9BA@Kopp.com>...
>Interesting that you should mention this.  I recently got the O.K. from one
of
>my professors to do an undergraduate research project next semester to add
>backwards raytracing to POV-Ray.  I've been doing a lot of thinking about
this
>over the past month and I've got some ideas on how to do it which turned
out to
>be very similar to the "photon map" by Henrik Wann Jensen.  Jensen's work
with
>photon maps seems to have been a success, both in terms of image quality
and in
>rendering speed.  You can read about it at:
>http://www.gk.dtu.dk/home/hwj/
>http://www.gk.dtu.dk/home/hwj/papers/ewr7/index.html
>
>An example of rendering time (from Jensen's paper):
>  Machine: 100Mhz Pentium with 32 megs of RAM
>  -A diffuse Cornell box (standard radiosity test scene)
>    Preprocessing (about 300k 'photons'): 67 sec
>    Rendering (at 1280x960): 8 min
>  -A glossy Cornell box
>    Preprocessing (about 380k 'photons'): 56 sec
>    Rendering (at 2560x1920): 50 min
>
>A render of the diffuse Cornell box at the same resolution by the Radiance
>renderer took 60 minutes.
>
>My original work will not be as extensive as Jensen's, but I will try to do
it
>in such a way that future enhancements will be easy for myself or others to
>add.
>
>Because I'll be doing this for college credit, I will be able to justify
>spending some extra time on POV. :-)  However, input from other POV
programmers
>will be very helpful.  If I can get enough done, I really want to combine
this
>with your dispersion patch, which could produce some really nice images.
>
>-Nathan Kopp
>
>Daren Scot Wilson wrote:
>>
>> Alright, everyone keeps asking about caustics, of one sort or another,
>> so maybe next week I'll tinker around with adding it.
>>
>> Before I start, though, has anyone made or found a list of previous
>> attempts that have failed?  I'd hate to reinvent a wheel and discover
>> the hard way that it won't roll...
>>
>> --
>> Daren Scot Wilson
>> Member, ACM
>> dar### [at] pipelinecom
>> www.newcolor.com
>> --
>> "A ship in a harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for"
>>                      -- William Shedd

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