Nieminen Mika wrote:
> 
> Nathan Kopp <Nat### [at] koppcom> wrote:
> : Are there no photons (black shadow) or just no highlight (normal looking
> : shadow)?
> 
>   No highlight. It looks just like the photons are dispersed so that they
> don't make a highlight instead of being grouped in a very little area like
> with the solid cylinder. Perhaps that's just the way it works...

I think it's just the way it works.

>   Another question:
> 
>   Do the program stop sending more photons after certain number of
> reflections/refractions are performed and new ones will not affect
> noticeably the illumination of the scene? What I mean is that if there
> is some 'confidence' value when calculating photons, just like povray
> does when sending rays from the camera (I'm talking about the ADC_Bailout
> value in global_settings or 'confidence' in focal blurred camera).

The patch right now just uses the max_trace_level of the normal trace
loop.  I want to set it up so you get a photon-specific max_trace and
adc_bailout.

>   I ask this because I'm continuously running out of memory even with
> the simplest scenes (I have 64 megs of ram).
>   I have a scene rendering right now. It have been rendering for over a
> day (ie. 24 hours) now. It spends about 99% of the time just swapping
> (the image is rendered in less than a half of an hour with less photons,
> but it looks blotchy).

That's no good.  I really think you have too many photons.  ;-)

>   I think that it would be a very good idea if you could set the photons
> 'confidence' value in the global_settings block, just like with the focal
> blur settings in the camera.
>   This way you could set a very high max_trace_level and also a very high
> confidence in photons and you shouldn't run out of memory.
> 
>   Btw, I hope you will compile a version of the patch with pov 3.1d/e soon
> because rendering lathes with the current version is painly slow... :)

Hmmm... I thought of that... unfortunately, it takes a lot of work to move
all of my various changes (especially UV mapping) into a new set of files.
Maybe it would simply be easier for me to update the lathe rendering code.
Does anyone know which lathe-intersection (or polynomial-solving) functions
changed?  (Ron, does the superpatch have the fast lathe intersections?)

-Nathan

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