>> Some weeks ago I told you that I have been working on a patch for
  >> tracing stereoscopic images with POV-Ray. I asked, if there were
  >> interest. There was, and several people contacted me via email
  >> too. So I made an unofficial POV-Ray Version out of my patch.

Edward Coffey wrote:
  > Could this be extended to speed the rendering of fly-throughs of
  > static (or near static) scenes?  Rather than two slightly
  > different views of a scene, an arbitrary number, each slightly
  > different than the one before? Or would it only be useful where
  > every frame is shot from a fairly similar perspective, rather
  > than simply being similar to the preceeding one?

The stereoscopic baseline is allways parallel to the "right" vector.
My "StereoCache" datastructure exploits this fact: When one pixel is
traced, we know that the corresponding pixel on the other halfimage
will be on the same line (row). And by using the camera geometry and
the depth of the intersection found, I can predict the exact pixel
where it will be needed. I then store the reusable lighting and
texturing data at this pixel. So every pixel has to look at a single
memory location if there is cached data.

So the answer is: It could be extended to fly-throughs only if
the camera motion is strictly collinear to the "right" vector.

---
BTW: As standard fisheye camera doesn't fulfill this prerequisite,
it can not use StereoCache. For the same reason it produces so
called "height errors" and is not very good suited for stereo.
Because of this I invented a new fisheye-like camera type
(ultra_wide_angle 2) that fulfills this condition and thus can
use StereoCache and doesn't produce "height errors".


Hermann

Post a reply to this message