MikeH wrote:
> 
> > Besides, part of the problem is that POV-Ray is incapable of handling
> > scenes with high levels of contrast which are meaningful to the human
> > eye. If it can't generate this much contrast - even algorithmically,
> > before it ever puts pixel to screen - then how can it possibly extract
> > an accurate simulation from the crippled data?
> 
> I think it can, but it needs to take place before the pixel is written to the
> file.  POV seems to store the RGB colors as floating point numbers, which should
> provide more than enough dynamic range.  Only problem I see is that numbers
> greater than one get clipped, which means that you would still need to make an
> effort not to have colors in the scene that exceed this.  This isn't all that
> hard though...

It isn't? Boy, I sure must suck then.. I've had reasonable success
lighting a room with "artificial" lighting, but as soon as I try to open
a door or window and shine sunlight in, my lighting model goes straight
to hell.

I suppose I could adjust the lighting so that the sunlight doesn't
create numbers greater than one, but then my other lights get dimmed
into nonexistence and so does my radiosity. A patch that bends the
luminance in 48 bits *might* fix this, but it seems like a ghastly way
to develop a scene, and I think some kind of adaptive scaling would be
much, much better than clipping.

-Xplo

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