On 6/22/2011 11:45 PM, Warp wrote:
> Kevin Wampler<wam### [at] uwashingtonedu>  wrote:
>> Also, it shouldn't be too hard at all to get povray to output into a
>> format you can do this with
>
>    Just output the depth and surface normal information for each pixel
> (besides the regular pixel color information, in HDRI resolution for
> extra oomph, of course) and you can do a lot of postprocessing with it.
>
>    (In fact, if this information would be output for each recursion level
> instead of just the first one, the possibilities would increas, as it
> would allow more accurate post-processed focal blurring of reflections,
> refractions, etc.)
>

This would of course work as a quick hack in some cases, but I'd imagine 
it'd have difficulty near death discontinuities, particularly for scenes 
like looking through nearby grass at a distant background where depth 
discontinuities are everywhere.  I'm sure it's solvable in a 
good-enough-for-most-scenes sense though.

In any case, I suspect that the camera itself works through an entirely 
different technique called light field photography (or plenoptic 
photography).  Instead of me describing it you can read about it here: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plenoptic_camera  This sort of thing should 
be downright trivial to do in povray, although render times would be high.

As a side note, I have occasionally though it would be really useful to 
get a really rich image representation such as you describe form povray. 
  Particularly since it seems like you should be able to do thing like 
change some of the material parameters of objects and some things about 
lighting and see results in real time if you had a good image 
description like that.

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