I was wondering if there is a way to access the hit time (aka depth value)
for the output pixels of a render. The idea is to render a heightfield with
povray, and reading back each pixel ray's hit time.

If you are wondering why I want this information, take a look at this paper
from SIGGRAPH2003: "View-dependent displacement mapping" by Wang et al
(Microsoft) available on ACM.ORG. They store displacements of height fields
relative to a reference plane, and store them in a texture, one for each
viewdirection. Also, I would need to be able to set up an orthographic
camera (ie. the rays should be shot parallel to each other through the
viewplane pixels, not originating from an eye point)

If anyone has some idea's if this would be possible with POVRay, please set
me on the right track :)

--n

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