Actually, I soon realized that I had more or less described blurry
reflections already incorporated into Wyzard's patch and the Suprpatch;
using standard radiosity and a little bit of very blurry reflectiveness
_might_ give the desired effect. I'll experiment with this.
Yes, it's slow, but the method you describe would still require a high
number of sample points to give a fairly accurate representation of the
normal map.
Incorporating diffuse and specular properties into radiosity calculations
would still be useful, of course.

Margus.

Nathan Kopp wrote in message <36AAB5EF.A1F019CC@Kopp.com>...
>I think you'd find a lot more noise in the image (and it would probably be
>a lot slower).  What I was thinking was this:
>
>Right now, when POV takes samples, it averages them and saves just the
>color.  It could, however, save the direction/brightness of each sample.
>Then, instead of just doing a weighted-average of nearby points to
>interpolate in-between colors, you would reuse the individual samples.
>With knowledge of both direction and brightness, you could calculate
>diffuse, phong, and specular components.  This might be considerable slower
>(100+ samples per intersection), but probably not a great deal slower,
since
>you would be reusing samples instead of tracing them.  Going through a
'for'
>loop 100 times doing a few dot products each time is not _that_ time
>consuming.
>
>I would keep an option of the current version, though, for speed reasons.
>I also think it is important to generalize radiosity a little bit more, so
>that it works for reflections (like the furry cat picture in the latest
>IRTC) and allows more recursion depth.
>
>Right now I'm working on the photon map stuff, but this is interesting
>enough for me to play with it too.  :-)
>
>-Nathan

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