--- ray/doc/notes/ReleaseNotes 2005/02/07 17:08:16 1.65 +++ ray/doc/notes/ReleaseNotes 2005/09/21 17:17:24 1.103 @@ -1382,7 +1382,7 @@ care to support officially due to its machine-dependen Fixed bug that caused incorrect reporting of non-surface in set when mixing meshes and instances. (Thanks to Jack de Valpine for discovery.) -Fixed innacuracy in calculation of diffuse transmission in the presence +Fixed inaccuracy in calculation of diffuse transmission in the presence of pure specular (Fresnel reflection) using "trans" material. Thanks to Christoph Reinhart for pointing out the error. @@ -1402,3 +1402,130 @@ Added setting of focus distance in rvu ("focus" comman Changed default remote shell in ranimate to "ssh" rather than "rsh", which has been abandoned on most Unix systems due to security issues. + +Fixed behavior of source primitive using illum with no alternate +material. These now become transparent so one can see the sky or +light-probe background for use in image-based lighting. Previously, +the user needed to specify the background glow as the alternate +material for a distant illum source to behave properly. (This still +works.) + +Fixed some minor problems and inconsistencies with 16-bit/channel +TIFF i/o in ra_tiff. + +Created mksource program to generate distant sources for improved +image-based lighting with light probes. + +Changed ambient calculation so that -ad will not limit recursion +depth, and a minimum of 27 samples will be sent out for each stored +ambient value, or 3 samples if -aa is 0 (caching off). + +Added -oM option to rtrace to report material (rather than modifier) +for cases where actual material is aliased or further up modifier chain. + +Rearranged the way ray contributions are computed so that it might be +possible to use rtrace to derive daylight coefficients and optical +transfer functions. The new -oTW option of rtrace produces color +contribution weights for each ray, which combined with the -ti (or -tI) +option permits the contribution of selected surfaces or sources to +be determined. Using the -oTW option, one should also specify +options "-dt 0 -aa 0 -as 0" for optimal results. In particular, +one cannot expect reasonable tallies with -ab >= 1 and irradiance +caching on (-aa > 0). + +The same code modifications included a change to the indirect computation +with caching switched off (-aa 0). Whereas before, the number of secondary +rays after the first bounce were half of the previous generation, they are +now determined by the surface reflectance, making for a better and faster +calculation. It should now be possible to compute many bounces with -aa 0, +which used to be prohibitively expensive. + +Added -T option to xshowtrace to trace rays to light sources. + +Added meta2bmp program to produce BMP files from metafile graphics. + +Added cct_x(t) and cct_y(t) to src/cal/cal/blackbody.cal to interpolate +CIE chromaticities for particular black-body temperatures. + +Increased maximum number of input pictures in pcomb and pcompos to 512. + +Created rtcontrib program for computing ray contribution coefficients. +This tool may be used to do standard optical ray tracing or daylight +coefficient calculations for annual simulations, among other uses. + +Added tilde ('~') output option as part of the -o* specification of +rtrace. This permits ray trees to be parsed more easily in binary +output mode, as needed by rtcontrib. + +Implemented Russian roulette ray termination with -lr <= 0. +Made -lr -10 the default in rtcontrib. + +Made rtcontrib -f option search RAYPATH directories. + +Made it so -o option of rtcontrib can pipe -o output to a command. + +Added -if and -of options to total for binary i/o (following rcalc mold). + +Switched default options in rtrace to use Russian roulette. (Rpict and rvu +still use biased ray termination.) + +Added rtcontrib -r option to recover partial output. + +Added -u rendering option for pure Monte Carlo sampling. +(Got rid of -DMC compile option, which this makes superfluous.) + +Changed -t option of rlam to accept strings as well as single characters. + +Fixed bug in rcalc with -l option where it would sometimes go into an +infinite loop. + +Fixed truly ancient bug in bounding box computation for cones, which +could (and did) cause missing segments. + +Added -z option to normtiff to output LZW-compressed files. + +Last change to total causes it to produce results when it sees an empty +line on the input. This was not intentional, but I decided I like this +behavior so I documented it rather than changing it. + +===================== +Version 3.8 + +Fixed Russian roulette ray termination, which was doing the opposite of +what it should have been doing, resulting in overestimated values below +minimum ray sampling weight (serious). + +Changed mksource to use 98th percentile (rather than 99th) for threshold. + +(Above changes included in 3.7.1 patch release.) + +Eliminated writing of EXPOSURE= line in ra_tiff -r when source TIFF +does not have STONITS set. + +Fixed bug in ambient calculation that caused black values for multiple +bounces in some scenes. Thanks to Mark Stock for creating and sharing +the sophisticated test scene that demonstrated this problem. + +Fixed bug in antimatter using Russian Roulette sampling. + +(Above changes included in 3.7.2 patch release 22 Aug 2005.) + +Created fieldcomb script to combine alternate fields in a rendering +sequence. (Development generously sponsored by Iebele Abel.) + +Added missing preload of mesh objects for more efficient memory use +during parallel rendering -- this was a serious oversight. + +Created ran2tiff program to automate exposure setting of animation +sequences using a moving histogram in combination with pcond, and +converting frames to TIFF. + +Eliminated SPEED macro from makeall and source tree. + +Added -pj option to vwrays to allow jittering of sample locations. + +Fixed bug in rtcontrib where it occasionally missed writing the +final bin file. (Pretty serious, actually.) + +Added -Dfseeko=fseek to MACH= line for linux, as fseeko(3) seems to be +broken in current versions of Linux. (Need to remove this later.)