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Comparing ray/doc/notes/ReleaseNotes (file contents):
Revision 1.67 by greg, Tue Mar 22 04:51:56 2005 UTC vs.
Revision 1.113 by greg, Wed Dec 28 19:42:13 2005 UTC

# Line 1382 | Line 1382 | care to support officially due to its machine-dependen
1382   Fixed bug that caused incorrect reporting of non-surface in set when
1383   mixing meshes and instances.  (Thanks to Jack de Valpine for discovery.)
1384  
1385 < Fixed innacuracy in calculation of diffuse transmission in the presence
1385 > Fixed inaccuracy in calculation of diffuse transmission in the presence
1386   of pure specular (Fresnel reflection) using "trans" material.  Thanks
1387   to Christoph Reinhart for pointing out the error.
1388  
# Line 1412 | Line 1412 | works.)
1412  
1413   Fixed some minor problems and inconsistencies with 16-bit/channel
1414   TIFF i/o in ra_tiff.
1415 +
1416 + Created mksource program to generate distant sources for improved
1417 + image-based lighting with light probes.
1418 +
1419 + Changed ambient calculation so that -ad will not limit recursion
1420 + depth, and a minimum of 27 samples will be sent out for each stored
1421 + ambient value, or 3 samples if -aa is 0 (caching off).
1422 +
1423 + Added -oM option to rtrace to report material (rather than modifier)
1424 + for cases where actual material is aliased or further up modifier chain.
1425 +
1426 + Rearranged the way ray contributions are computed so that it might be
1427 + possible to use rtrace to derive daylight coefficients and optical
1428 + transfer functions.  The new -oTW option of rtrace produces color
1429 + contribution weights for each ray, which combined with the -ti (or -tI)
1430 + option permits the contribution of selected surfaces or sources to
1431 + be determined.  Using the -oTW option, one should also specify
1432 + options "-dt 0 -aa 0 -as 0" for optimal results.  In particular,
1433 + one cannot expect reasonable tallies with -ab >= 1 and irradiance
1434 + caching on (-aa > 0).
1435 +
1436 + The same code modifications included a change to the indirect computation
1437 + with caching switched off (-aa 0).  Whereas before, the number of secondary
1438 + rays after the first bounce were half of the previous generation, they are
1439 + now determined by the surface reflectance, making for a better and faster
1440 + calculation.  It should now be possible to compute many bounces with -aa 0,
1441 + which used to be prohibitively expensive.
1442 +
1443 + Added -T option to xshowtrace to trace rays to light sources.
1444 +
1445 + Added meta2bmp program to produce BMP files from metafile graphics.
1446 +
1447 + Added cct_x(t) and cct_y(t) to src/cal/cal/blackbody.cal to interpolate
1448 + CIE chromaticities for particular black-body temperatures.
1449 +
1450 + Increased maximum number of input pictures in pcomb and pcompos to 512.
1451 +
1452 + Created rtcontrib program for computing ray contribution coefficients.
1453 + This tool may be used to do standard optical ray tracing or daylight
1454 + coefficient calculations for annual simulations, among other uses.
1455 +
1456 + Added tilde ('~') output option as part of the -o* specification of
1457 + rtrace.  This permits ray trees to be parsed more easily in binary
1458 + output mode, as needed by rtcontrib.
1459 +
1460 + Implemented Russian roulette ray termination with -lr <= 0.
1461 + Made -lr -10 the default in rtcontrib.
1462 +
1463 + Made rtcontrib -f option search RAYPATH directories.
1464 +
1465 + Made it so -o option of rtcontrib can pipe -o output to a command.
1466 +
1467 + Added -if and -of options to total for binary i/o (following rcalc mold).
1468 +
1469 + Switched default options in rtrace to use Russian roulette.  (Rpict and rvu
1470 + still use biased ray termination.)
1471 +
1472 + Added rtcontrib -r option to recover partial output.
1473 +
1474 + Added -u rendering option for pure Monte Carlo sampling.
1475 + (Got rid of -DMC compile option, which this makes superfluous.)
1476 +
1477 + Changed -t option of rlam to accept strings as well as single characters.
1478 +
1479 + Fixed bug in rcalc with -l option where it would sometimes go into an
1480 + infinite loop.
1481 +
1482 + Fixed truly ancient bug in bounding box computation for cones, which
1483 + could (and did) cause missing segments.
1484 +
1485 + Added -z option to normtiff to output LZW-compressed files.
1486 +
1487 + Last change to total causes it to produce results when it sees an empty
1488 + line on the input.  This was not intentional, but I decided I like this
1489 + behavior so I documented it rather than changing it.
1490 +
1491 + =====================
1492 + Version 3.8
1493 +
1494 + Fixed Russian roulette ray termination, which was doing the opposite of
1495 + what it should have been doing, resulting in overestimated values below
1496 + minimum ray sampling weight (serious).
1497 +
1498 + Changed mksource to use 98th percentile (rather than 99th) for threshold.
1499 +
1500 + (Above changes included in 3.7.1 patch release.)
1501 +
1502 + Eliminated writing of EXPOSURE= line in ra_tiff -r when source TIFF
1503 + does not have STONITS set.
1504 +
1505 + Fixed bug in ambient calculation that caused black values for multiple
1506 + bounces in some scenes.  Thanks to Mark Stock for creating and sharing
1507 + the sophisticated test scene that demonstrated this problem.
1508 +
1509 + Fixed bug in antimatter using Russian Roulette sampling.
1510 +
1511 + (Above changes included in 3.7.2 patch release 22 Aug 2005.)
1512 +
1513 + Created fieldcomb script to combine alternate fields in a rendering
1514 + sequence.  (Development generously sponsored by Iebele Abel.)
1515 +
1516 + Added missing preload of mesh objects for more efficient memory use
1517 + during parallel rendering -- this was a serious oversight.
1518 +
1519 + Created ran2tiff program to automate exposure setting of animation
1520 + sequences using a moving histogram in combination with pcond, and
1521 + converting frames to TIFF.
1522 +
1523 + Eliminated SPEED macro from makeall and source tree.
1524 +
1525 + Added -pj option to vwrays to allow jittering of sample locations.
1526 +
1527 + Fixed bug in rtcontrib where it occasionally missed writing the
1528 + final bin file.  (Pretty serious, actually.)
1529 +
1530 + Added -Dfseeko=fseek to MACH= line for linux, as fseeko(3) seems to be
1531 + broken in current versions of Linux.  (Need to remove this later.)
1532 +
1533 + Rearranged struct's for better efficiency on 64-bit architectures.
1534 +
1535 + Added -i option to rlam so it works with binary input formats.
1536 +
1537 + Added rtcontrib -bn option to specify number of bins and fixed bug
1538 + in recovery of files containing multiple values per record.
1539 +
1540 + Added rtcontrib -fo option to write over existing files, which it now
1541 + refuses to do without this option.
1542 +
1543 + Made rtcontrib flush output when handed a zero-length ray vector,
1544 + to match behavior of rtrace.
1545 +
1546 + Improved color scale for falsecolor output.
1547 +
1548 + Added threshold test for Fresnel approximation to prevent its use
1549 + on smooth surfaces with unrealistically low specularities (less than 1.8%).
1550 + Water has a specular reflectance of 2.1% at room temperture.
1551 +
1552 + Removed NICE macro settings in rpict and rtrace, which was slowing down
1553 + the processes under Mac OS X (10.4) by about 60% due to processor napping.
1554 +
1555 + Made xform, replmarks and rad2mgf handle quoted modifiers and names properly.
1556 +
1557 + Fixed problem in genblinds, where it was generating slats that were too
1558 + wide with the +/-r option.  (Thanks to Helena Buelow-Huebe for discovering
1559 + this bug.)

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