Angelo 'kENpEX' Pesce <ken### [at] uniplanit> wrote:
: 1) Programmable shaders

  A nice feature which we all look forward to having some day.

: So I've understood that having something like compiled-plugins is not
: possible with povray... Now what? the only alternative I can think of
: is making them with scripts, mabye supporting directly the renderman
: specification (povman is great)... The problem with this is that's
: really really harder to do, and to do it fast!

  If PRMan and other renderers can do it fast, why not povray?

: Mabye a compiled script
: (like renderman system) should be used, something like java-vm...

  Well, of course.
  (Currently functions are byte-compiled and executed by a VM, so it would
really be just an extention to the current VM implementation.)

: 2) Focus more on rendering speed than on adding new rendering
: algorithms for the future

  Of course speed is a really important issue. The problem is that it's not
as easy as it may sound. POV-Ray already uses very advanced optimization
techniques for speed (vista buffers, lights buffersm bounding box hierarchies,
octrees for meshes...). Getting even more speed can be really complicated,
and require quite a lot of research on high-end algorithms.

: 3) Support for nurbs surfaces and subdivision surfaces, with
: automatic, adaptive tessellation (rulez!)

  Perfectly possible. Not at all improbable some day.

: 4) Blurred reflection

  You can already do blurred reflection (see my other post where I show
an example). You can also make blurred refraction currently as well.

  Besides, I think that the idea of not including the megapov blurred
reflection is that the team wants to implement something more general and
versatile, which can used not only for blurred reflection, but for many,
many other related things as well.

: Adaptive DOF, the same stuff as above...

  Povray's focal blur *is* adaptive. What do you think those 'confidence'
and 'variance' values are for?

: 5) compiled scene-scripts support.

  This is practically identical to request 1.

: 6) a rendering strip distribuiton server/client tool (external) over a
: tcp/ip network...

  This has been taken into account long time ago. Be assured that every
possibility will be carefully studied. (It's not like the developers wouldn't
*want* to add support for that).

: 7) displacement mapping

  Not possible.
  (Well, possible for meshes, but then you need to tesselate the objects.)

-- 
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7382340,3358,3900569407,970,4254934330},0)}//                     - Warp -

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