"sooperFoX" <bon### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
>
> Speaking of "biased"... ;) how hard would it be to get path tracing going with
> the 3.7 codebase? (think mc-pov 3.7)

I've already pondered the idea. And found no reason why it shouldn't work.

Well, except for one thing: That "render until I like it" feature with interim
result output would currently be an issue. Nothing that couldn't be solved
though. For starters, high-quality anti-aliasing settings might do instead of
rendering the shot over and over again.

Eliminating classic lighting would be easy: Just don't use it.

Reflection and transmission could be handled by existing code without any change
at all. Adding blur, like in MCPov, would be an extra gimmick that in my opinion
might be of interest for standard POV-Ray scenes anyway.

The "diffuse job" could be fully covered by radiosity code, by just bypassing
the sample cache, using a low sample ray count and high recursion depth, and
some fairly small changes to a few internal parameters. That, plus another
thing that has already made its way onto the radiosity agenda: The radiosity
sample ray pattern would have to be able to use certain hints in the scene
about bright areas (MCPov's "portals"); and for monte-carlo tracing it would
have to be truly random.

So there would be some work to do, but basically nothing that wouldn't fit into
the 3.7 framework.


Ah, and SSLT should nicely fit into the thing as well, as soon as it properly
works with radiosity.

Scattering media would remain a problem, unless one would go for full volumetric
monte-carlo scattering simulation. Which, for highly scattering media, might be
veeeeeery slow.

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