William F Pokorny <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:

> Performance stuff.

Very educational.   Certainly something to aware of when writing more advanced
scenes.

> Results stuff due function noise generator handling!
> ---------
> If you work enough with functions and patterns, you'll eventually stub
> your toe on the fact functions use only the scene setting for the noise
> generator(b) and not any pattern specific ones. This can be really
> confusing.

Thanks for documenting this here.   I'm not sure I would have noticed if/when it
mattered, and would have been tearing my hair out trying to debug the SDL....

> For many years I wrongly assumed pattern distributions were somewhat
> normalized in the 0-1 range so 0-1 maps could more or less be reasonably
> switched between patterns. It's not always so. Pattern distributions
> differ quite a lot and understanding this is important when best using
> them. Be aware of each pattern's value distribution.

As you're aware, I've made a few stabs at visualizing that.
I'm also curious about the details of exactly what you've discovered.

> To this end I've been thinking about additional pattern related
> documentation; The form it might take. See attached
> dentsPatternDistDoc.png image for an idea on how this could be done. The
> distribution show in green is the linear value distribution for the
> dents pattern.

I'm still interested in this, especially from a design and implementation
stance.

While creating new documentation is a good idea, it's extremely arduous to craft
language of sufficient breadth and specificity to communicate something as
complex as a 3D pattern function, especially with all the modifiers.

We all know that a render if worth 1000 lines of docs, so maybe the step
preceding any writing would be to illustrate the intent of the documentation
with scene files/renders/animations that show ranges, variations, and best
practices.

Your comparison reminds me of the contour plots done by Mike Williams and Paul
Nylander.
http://www.econym.demon.co.uk/isotut/isobars.htm
http://bugman123.com/Programs/index.html


Great work as always, Bill.   Will there be a simple way to install and update
povr at some point so that folks can play along at home?

Post a reply to this message