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Comparing ray/doc/notes/ReleaseNotes (file contents):
Revision 1.65 by greg, Mon Feb 7 17:08:16 2005 UTC vs.
Revision 1.133 by greg, Mon Feb 26 21:16:02 2007 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 1402 | Line 1402 | Added setting of focus distance in rvu ("focus" comman
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.
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.)
1560 +
1561 + Fixed bug in ra_ppm for 16-bit/sample i/o, where it was getting the byte
1562 + order wrong (apparently).
1563 +
1564 + Added -V option to rtcontrib to report actual contributions, rather than
1565 + just ray coefficients.
1566 +
1567 + Fixed bug in ranimate that caused it to fail in continuation of renderings.
1568 +
1569 + Renamed librt.a to librtrad.a, to avoid conflict on Solaris. Almost
1570 + everything now gets linked to -lrtrad instead of -lrt.
1571 +
1572 + Fixed problem with large sample sets, so -u+ option now is truly random.
1573 + Thanks to Rick Mistrick and Younju Yoon for identifying this problem,
1574 + which was related to a poorly designed hash function.
1575 +
1576 + Changed -u+ to be the default setting in rtrace (only).
1577 +
1578 + Fixed binary i/o for rlam and vwrays under Windows.
1579 +
1580 + Added tmCvLums() to tone-mapping routines using a 16-bit lookup table
1581 + on IEEE floats, which is also used to improve speed of COLOR conversions,
1582 + especially on machines with slow log() calls.  The first call to
1583 + tmCvLums(), tmCvGrays(), or tmCvColors() initializes the table.
1584 +
1585 + Created optics2rad.csh script to convert from Optics 5 material output
1586 + to something correct for Radiance.  Built on old glazing.cal function,
1587 + which is actually incorrect so removed from the distribution.
1588 +
1589 + Fixed nuisance bug in ximage under some SGI machines that caused it to
1590 + choose an inappropriate visual and display incorrect colors.  (Thanks
1591 + to Oskar Itzinger for debugging the problem.)
1592 +
1593 + Fixed long-standing inaccuracy of pcompos -t and +t thresholding options.
1594 +
1595 + Fixed bug in handling of views with tabs rather than spaces.
1596 +
1597 + Fixed bug related to alias of alias.
1598 +
1599 + ****** COMPATIBILITY CHANGE ********
1600 + Changed default sky turbidity in gensky from the original default of
1601 + 2.75 to the CIE 110-1994 standard value of 2.45.  Thanks to Marilyne
1602 + Anderson of MIT for pointing out this discrepancy.
1603 +
1604 + Added -o option to ra_xyze to produce original pixel values.
1605 +
1606 + Fixed bug in tracing of virtual sources, where intervening glazing was
1607 + not being accounted for properly.
1608 +
1609 + Added -h option to pcompos and pcomb to eliminate verbose headers.
1610 +
1611 + =====================
1612 + Version 3.9
1613 +
1614 + Added -spec option to falsecolor to restore original spectral color scale.
1615 + Also added "-s auto" option to automatically set the maximum value.
1616 +
1617 + Added byte-swapping input and output to rcalc.
1618 +
1619 + Additional error-checking for source surfaces.

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