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Comparing ray/doc/notes/ReleaseNotes (file contents):
Revision 1.43 by greg, Fri Sep 10 16:05:07 2004 UTC vs.
Revision 1.107 by greg, Tue Oct 11 16:54:26 2005 UTC

# Line 1256 | Line 1256 | Added -I option to replmarks for mesh instancing.
1256   Made similar change for virtual sources to allow modifiers and aliases
1257   on the mirror and prism types to work properly.
1258  
1259 < Rob Guglielmetti dded -lw and -lh options to falsecolor to control the
1259 > Rob Guglielmetti added -lw and -lh options to falsecolor to control the
1260   legend dimensions.  Made it so -lw 0 and/or -lh 0 turns legend off.
1261  
1262   Made it so pcompos will read everything from a stream even if it doesn't
# Line 1296 | Line 1296 | Fixed a very obscure bug in rpict that caused a dark h
1296   line in certain cylindrical projections due to improper drawing
1297   of the sky dome source in rt/srcdraw.c.
1298  
1299 < Fixed problems with effective ray lenths computed for dielectric
1299 > Fixed problems with effective ray lengths computed for dielectric
1300   and BRTDfunc materials.  This was most evident in breakup of holodeck
1301   views when VDISTANCE=True.
1302  
# Line 1305 | Line 1305 | Fixed rad so that 'scene' variable may consist only of
1305   Fixed bug introduced in shadow caching routines where sources in the
1306   middle of spheres were not illuminating properly.  Thanks to Guilio
1307   Antonutto for spotting this problem.
1308 +
1309 + Modified gensky behavior so if time is given with standard time zone
1310 + designation, any -m option is ignored.
1311 +
1312 + Added -n option to mkillum for (shared memory) parallel processing.
1313 +
1314 + Fixed a long-standing bug in parallel processing code that only
1315 + seemed to manifest with the new mkillum -n option, where rtrace
1316 + would deadlock upon termination.  The reason it never showed up
1317 + before is because I always closed processes in the reverse order
1318 + of opening them in other programs.  I went through and found similar
1319 + (potential) bugs in the rview device subprocess code and util/netproc.c.
1320 +
1321 + Corrected the normalization of the Gaussian reflectance model.  This will
1322 + cause an increase in specularity for low-lying light sources.
1323 + Thanks to Don Walters of Boeing and Arne Duer of the Univ. of Innsbruck
1324 + for pointing out this error.  The square root used for the two cosines
1325 + in the denominator of the normalization factor should not be present.
1326 + This was a serious mistake I made in the original model, which went
1327 + undiscovered (at least to my knowledge) for over a decade.  I think
1328 + Bruce Walter of Cornell may have known about it, but I never heard
1329 + the details of his discovery.
1330 +
1331 + Enabled the -p option for primary conversion without tone-mapping
1332 + in ra_bmp.  Also provides for XYZE input conversion to RGB.
1333 +
1334 + Fixed what I consider a bug in pvalue -o when taking XYZE files on input,
1335 + where it was inappropriately undoing the exposure value so that it always
1336 + reported radiance rather than XYZ values with Y in cd/m^2.
1337 +
1338 + Made it so ra_bmp only produces run-length encoded 8-bit output for
1339 + grayscale images that are tone-mapped.  This minimizes circumstances
1340 + under which output scanline order is reversed.
1341 +
1342 + Fixed bug in rcalc where it sometimes wasn't parsing the input format
1343 + correctly.
1344 +
1345 + =====================
1346 + Version 3.7
1347 +
1348 + Fixed bug in source occluder cache which caused consistency error
1349 + for distant sources and mist materials.  (Thanks to Mark Stock for
1350 + finding the problem.)
1351 +
1352 + Fixed serious bug in source drawing routines for rpict, where the edges
1353 + of light sources were appearing through obstructions.  (Thanks to Veronica
1354 + Sundstedt for pointing this out.)
1355 +
1356 + (The above were included in the 3.6.1 patch release.)
1357 +
1358 + Changed default temporary directory from /usr/tmp, which doesn't exist
1359 + on a lot of systems these days, to /tmp.
1360 +
1361 + Eliminated many unused files and programs from the distribution, including
1362 + the following programs that were being built but no longer used:
1363 +        oki20   - printer driver for OkiMate 20 printer (B&W)
1364 +        oki20c  - printer driver for OkiMate 20 color printer
1365 +        pcwarp  - intended as more general substitute for macbetcal,
1366 +                        but never quite worked
1367 +        ra_avs  - convert to & from AVS image format
1368 +        ra_bn   - convert to & from Barneyscann format
1369 +        ra_pr   - convert to & from 8-bit Sun rasterfile format
1370 +        ra_pr24 - convert to & from 24-bit Sun rasterfile format
1371 +        thf2rad - convert GDS "things file" to Radiance scene format
1372 + If anyone is still wanting any of the above programs, let us know and we'll
1373 + reinstate it.
1374 +
1375 + Fixed bug in pcond's acuity simulation for small view angles (less than
1376 + 4 degrees horizontally or vertically).  Thanks to James Lee for figuring
1377 + this out.
1378 +
1379 + Added script to convert to/from ICT's Poskanzer Float Map, which I don't
1380 + care to support officially due to its machine-dependent byte order.
1381 +
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 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 +
1389 + Made internal change to tone-mapping library to use structure pointer
1390 + rather than stack, making code re-entrant and more up to modern standards.
1391 +
1392 + Added -pd option to handle depth-of-field blur in rpict.  This requires
1393 + that the view directon (-vd option) include focal distance information,
1394 + which is now preserved by the various view file routines, and reported
1395 + by the vwright command.
1396 +
1397 + Added DBLUR variable to ranimate and pmdblur script to handle simultaneous
1398 + motion and depth-of-field blurring.  Thanks to Visarc for funding this work.
1399 +
1400 + Added setting of focus distance in rvu ("focus" command) and rholo
1401 + ('f'/"frame" command).
1402 +
1403 + Changed default remote shell in ranimate to "ssh" rather than "rsh",
1404 + which has been abandoned on most Unix systems due to security issues.
1405 +
1406 + Fixed behavior of source primitive using illum with no alternate
1407 + material.  These now become transparent so one can see the sky or
1408 + light-probe background for use in image-based lighting.  Previously,
1409 + the user needed to specify the background glow as the alternate
1410 + material for a distant illum source to behave properly.  (This still
1411 + 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.

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