In article <3A6DB06D.7D620ADA@aetec.ee>, Vahur Krouverk 
<vah### [at] aetecee> wrote:

> Interesting, but I'm not very sure, whether there is need for hard-coded
> patch for such feature. Of course I don't want to say,  that this patch
> creation is totally in vain and nobody will use it, but there is
> millions of possible patches, which could be all implemented in POV-Ray
> but will be used very rarely. I'm not sure, that this is desired very
> much, as in the end POV-Ray will end like some programs, having tons of
> features, which are not used and resulting in program gowth and
> slowness. 

Well, the basic portal types should be quite easy to do with a shader, 
and a shader would be much more flexible, but the syntax can be much 
simpler than an equivalent shader...the simplest version will just be 
"portal_pigment"... ;-)
This shader apparently does the "object normal" type, which uses the 
normal of the object to determine the direction of the ray...how complex 
would it be to take the direction of the original ray and apply an 
arbitrary transformation to it? That is what the default portal pigment 
does...
Also, my patch can handle cameras as well as simple portals...I don't 
think you can do that with a shader, you would have to write shaders for 
each camera type and pass them the parameters directly. Maybe have a 
macro generate the shader, if that is possible. And there is a 
possibility of doing direct lighting and photon interaction, which I 
don't think are possible with shaders unless you write your whole scene 
with some system of shaders.

-- 
Christopher James Huff
Personal: chr### [at] maccom, http://homepage.mac.com/chrishuff/
TAG: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg, http://tag.povray.org/

<><

Post a reply to this message