--- ray/doc/notes/ReleaseNotes 2022/08/21 16:20:42 1.421 +++ ray/doc/notes/ReleaseNotes 2023/11/27 22:04:45 1.433 @@ -2575,3 +2575,64 @@ Updated official copyright and license according to ne provided by Jean Haemmerle at the LBNL Intellectual Property Office. Both were copied verbatim from e-mail I received from Taoning Wang on 8/20/2022. + +Added -features option to rpict, rtrace, and rcontrib to check +which features are present or look for specific feature support. +This addition was suggested by Peter Apian-Bennewitz as an easier +way to determine which version of Radiance is installed and what +it supports, and is timely as we begin our refactoring of the +rendering code. There are no current plans to add this to rvu. + +Added falsecolor -odim, -orct, and -c0 options to overlay grid of +values on image. This was requested by Rob Shakespeare. + +Added -i* and -o* options in rhcopy for reading rays from the +standard input and writing rays from holodeck to standard output. +This will hopefully be useful in combining rholo with rcontrib. + +Added further checking for coincident (overlapping) flat surfaces, +preferring front sides to back sides in the ray intersection +calculation. This only applies to rings and faces, as the other +surface types would have required additional calculations to +make them work. Material transparency is still the primary +consideration, now followed by ray hit side, followed by +modifier definition order in the input. + +Increased octree and object limits to allow scenes with billions +of primitives. + +Made reciprocity averaging default to "off" in bsdf2ttree, as it seems +to create more problems than it solves. + +==================== +Version 6.0 + +Extensive changes to enable spectral rendering, which defaults to "off" +to maintain backwards-compatibility with previous versions, with the +exception of the ambient file format, which is changed. The MAXCSAMP +macro, which defaults to 24, sets the maximum number of spectral samples. +The actual number of samples is set by the "-cs" option, which defaults +to 3 for rpict, rtrace, and rcontrib. The latter two programs support +straight spectral output, but rpict is initially restricted to +tristimulus output pictures. New pattern primitives "spectrum", +"specfile", and "specfunc" have been added as a means to specify +spectral reflectance, emittance, etc. to materials that still have +only 3 color channels. Those RGB channels will still affect the +spectrum if used. Unfortunately photon-mapping is currently broken when +spectral sampling is enabled, but we will fix this as soon as possible. +Calculation overhead appears to be approximately 10-15% for RGB +renderings compared to version 5.4a. + +Added spectral rendering to rvu as well, and made -cs and -cw +options standard across the rendering library. I also brought +mkillum, ranimove, rsensor, and mksource into the fold. These +tools were broken in the initial release. (Hopefully, they are +working now, but none have been tested as yet.) +There was also an indexing bug in the spectral->RGB conversions +that made reds into blues and vice versa, which has been fixed. + +Added i/o for spectral pictures to rmtxop, the first program that can +ingest them. (Only rtrace, rcontrib, and rfluxmtx can render them.) +New symbolic rmtxop -c options, such as RGB, XYZ, S (for scotopic) +and M (for melanopic) make color conversions simpler. +Also added spectral picture support to rcrop and radcompare.