Hey Lutz,

Why no texture preview for Polyray? Can't you just insert a call in the
code like you did in the 2.x versions?

This really makes MORAY unusable for POLYray now... POLY is still a fine
renderer.

Thanks for any response.

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Hi Dearmad, you recently wrote in moray.win:

> Why no texture preview for Polyray? Can't you just insert a call in the
> code like you did in the 2.x versions?
Well the intricacies of the POV-Ray texturing capabilities were just
too much for us to translate to Polyray code, we don't know Polyray
well enough for that. In the long run we are going to drop Polyray
support.

But Alexander has written a renderer plugin based on his Polyray
engine that he will probably release soon and it can handle nearly all
the textures that can be built in the Material Editor.

- Lutz
  email : lut### [at] stmuccom
  Web   : http://www.stmuc.com/moray

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Lutz Kretzschmar <lut### [at] stmuccom> wrote in article
<367### [at] 194174214110>...
> Hi Dearmad, you recently wrote in moray.win:
> 
> > Why no texture preview for Polyray? Can't you just insert a call in the
> > code like you did in the 2.x versions?
> Well the intricacies of the POV-Ray texturing capabilities were just
> too much for us to translate to Polyray code, we don't know Polyray
> well enough for that. In the long run we are going to drop Polyray
> support.
> 
> But Alexander has written a renderer plugin based on his Polyray
> engine that he will probably release soon and it can handle nearly all
> the textures that can be built in the Material Editor.

Except that there isn't a way to get at the rendering for the texture
preview (unless I've missed one of the various interfaces you provide).

The best workaround (at least the one I use to test the plugin) is to have
a couple of simple scenes (sphere, cone, box, ...), adjust the texturing
parameters, and then render the scene.  Although the image comes up in a
separate window (not inside the texture editor), you get the right result. 
An added advantage to doing this is that if you tweak one of the
parameters, you can move the render windows next to each other and compare
how they look.

Xander

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Hello Xander,


Alexander Enzmann wrote:
<snip>
> 
> Except that there isn't a way to get at the rendering for the texture
> preview (unless I've missed one of the various interfaces you provide).
> 
> The best workaround (at least the one I use to test the plugin) is to have
> a couple of simple scenes (sphere, cone, box, ...), adjust the texturing
> parameters, and then render the scene.  Although the image comes up in a
> separate window (not inside the texture editor), you get the right result.
> An added advantage to doing this is that if you tweak one of the
> parameters, you can move the render windows next to each other and compare
> how they look.

Is this a plugin for MORAY or something to do with your new version of
Polyray or what?  More info, sil vous plais.

If it's for MORAY will it work with the new test version Lutz is going
to have up?  I registered 2.x MORAY but have yet to register any later
version as the improvements haven't helped me much and now without
texture previews, I'm really left in the dark.  Maybe its time to write
a simple C++ program to do this for me in more than 256 colors anyway...

At any rate, glad you're still pluggin away at POLYRAY for a hobby.


-- 
Of all, the worst humiliation women bring upon us
is the inferiority of our rivals.

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Dearmad <dea### [at] europacom> wrote in article
<36802421.396A7829@europa.com>...
> Hello Xander,
> ...
> 
> Is this a plugin for MORAY or something to do with your new version of
> Polyray or what?  More info, sil vous plais.

Both.  All rendering is performed by a Windows DLL, which can be used by
pretty much any Windows program (or DOS console program under Windows '9x
or NT).  I've tested it with C++, Delphi, and Java (works with JDK 1.1 and
up, not with MS J++).

The attachment to Moray is through a plugin DLL that walks through the
Moray scene and creates the appropriate primitives within the renderer. 
The simulation of textures is also performed by the plugin DLL, and are
provided to the renderer as callback functions.

Solid noise textures won't look exactly like what you get from POV-Ray. 
Since I didn't want to use any POV-Ray code (which would be quite
improper), the noise function will put it's features in slightly different
places.  The overall look is quite similar though.  

In general my renderer is faster than POV-Ray 3.1a (the Windows version
anyway, I haven't been using any others, so I can't really judge).  Not by
huge amounts, in general it's only 10-25% faster (in raytracing mode), with
certain kinds of scenes being slower.  For quick previews of your scene
using zbuffer/scanline, it is generally much faster (complex textures can
slow that down though).  The big exception is blobs - I need to code a
quicker tesselator.

The only significant things that aren't yet in the plugin are media and
radiosity.  I haven't quite figured out how to translate POV-Ray/Moray's
media into the renderers hypertexture - they are very close in what they
do.  The method POV-Ray uses for radiosity (which is based on Greg Ward's
work) would be easy to implement, but isn't as easy to get good results as
a more traditional polygon based hierarchical radiosity.

> 
> If it's for MORAY will it work with the new test version Lutz is going
> to have up?  I registered 2.x MORAY but have yet to register any later
> version as the improvements haven't helped me much and now without
> texture previews, I'm really left in the dark.  Maybe its time to write
> a simple C++ program to do this for me in more than 256 colors anyway...

Yes, it works with version 3.1 (the one being released now).  I think you
will want to get hold of this version.  It is a really nice step forward -
the inverse kinematics is a pretty incredible feature for a sub $100
modeller.

When using this plugin, the texture preview still isn't using Polyray (ask
Lutz to add this to the plugin architecture - he only adds features that
people consider high priorities).  However, it's not as big a deal because
a) I've got the textures pretty well matching POV-Ray, so you can expect to
see what you get if you have POV-Ray making the preview; b) if you make a
couple of simple scenes of sphere/cube/... you can have the texture editor
open and repeatedly render the scene as you change parameters - this will
result in a bunch of windows open that show what the texture looks like for
each of those settings.

Xander

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