I've just uploaded to p.b.s.f. a code sample that demonstrates my technique for
multipass rendering and compositing directly in POV-SDL.  It's a standard zip
file containing an example multipass scene and an associated compositing scene,
along with my multipass and compositing include files, so please try it for
yourselves. Any suggestions for improvement are certainly welcome.

Also, I made a screen capture video that shows the entire multipass/compositing
process from start to finish. Usually ray tracing is about as fun to watch as
paint drying but I recorded the six render passes at ~11x normal speed. So, it's
actually sort of fun to watch (and it makes me drool for when, a few years from
now, our computers will actually /be/ that fast). Actual render time for all 6
passes was just under 22 min.; the video is just under 3 min.

The compositing part at the end is recorded at normal speed, so you can see the
compositing in real time, which is only a few seconds each. Well, except for the
depth pass; that takes a bit longer because it uses my auto-contrast macro to
loop through all the pixels of the depth pass image to find the darkest &
lightest pixels, and then makes those values 0 and 1 respectively, stretching
the mid tones to fit via linear interpolation. It took 35 seconds for the entire
compositing process.

The video is here: http://vimeo.com/20987441

And here's the result of using the AutoContrast_Grayscale() macro on the depth
pass for my example.

Cheers,
Rob

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www.McGregorFineArt.com

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