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In article <01c05674$d4b80a40$617889d0@daysix>, "H. E. Day"
<Pov### [at] aol com> wrote:
> Could the vista buffer be used in such a way?
No...the vista buffer is entirely unrelated. It is a bounding feature,
kind of a bounding for bounding boxes, and has nothing to do with
scan-line algorithms, it wouldn't be any help in rendering hair.
> Perhaps a z-buffer post_process op? I wasn't suggesting that you do
> this *while* the render runs, but afterwards.
A post_process would be extremely limited...no reflections, the hair
either wouldn't be applied to objects behind transparent objects and
wouldn't show up around the edges of an object completely covering the
"hairy" object, or it would be applied over everything giving a
completely unrealistic and ugly result, etc...imagine your poodle
walking behind a pane of glass and turning into a bunch of spheres and
cones.
Also, it would basically require implementing a fairly advanced scanline
renderer as a post_process filter, as well as various other adjustments
so the needed information still exists at that stage. Might as well
write a new renderer...
> As for the memory hit, only one hair is in memory at a time, so there
> is no large memory hit.
If done one at a time, you trade time for memory, since you have to
recalculate the hairs for every pixel(storing enough hairs is obviously
not feasible, even with sharing mesh data...). It might be possible to
partly compensate with some kind of bounding scheme, so only hairs that
might be visible are tested, but it will still be a significant cost. A
media-like rendering algorithm still seems to be the best option, though
it would be slow. Maybe a new media type, maybe a completely different
feature.
> Also, you might want to download the demo. It really rocks, and
> gives a better idea of how these hairs are made.
"Intel Only - Win95, Win98, WinNT - LW 5.5,5.6,5.7,6.0,6.5"
--
Christopher James Huff
Personal: chr### [at] mac com, http://homepage.mac.com/chrishuff/
TAG: chr### [at] tag povray org, http://tag.povray.org/
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