[Radiance-general] animation

[Carsten Bauer]

Hi Iebele !

I dare to mix in the discussion, as the general topic is of some
interest for me, too. I myself thought/still think (and did experiment
as well) about "tricks" of what kind ever to produce good looking images 
in less time as currently needed. (Despite the benefits of physical
accuracy, the look of an image is very important for me, too).

By the way, if you use lots of light sources, you may check out that
direct cache stuff, (now the missing patch is included in the
distribution as well, so installation should work, too, sorry for
forgetting it at the first time). As long as you need some ambient
calculation, time saving is quite significant, maybe not as much as you
want, but making things 4 times faster is better than nothing.

Now back to your ideas: I thought of 2D postprocessing, too, for example
some sort of "shadow-softener" for images traced without ambient light,
with help of your idea of 3D-data integration maybe this might become a
realistic thing. There are some ways of tricking in 3D as well. POVRay
for example allows to assign ambient illumination to different objects
directly, it is no problem to integrate this into RADIANCE, too. If
you're interested, I may dig out the stuff and send it to you. (Don't
tell Greg of all this ... :-) ). Another way is to simulate ambient
light effects by some weak additional and invisible direct sources
suitably placed, as often it suffices to lighten the dark shadows which
appear in standard raytracing to mimick a realistic look. This method
has the further advantage that it is accessible to "feeling" rather than
the dry topic of parameters.

Last but not least, some of the hints you've asked for:

getting the mentioned data out of the machine certainly is the easiest
part of the way your're setting out to tread: 

Color output is done in the 'render()' routine within rpict.c, with help
of the 'pixvalue()' (rpict.c) routine giving that color, the rest is not
of interest for this case. Rather than writing data to stdout, it would
be easier to write them directly to a file, as rpict uses stdout for
messages. The data you want to extract are contained in the ray
structure (check ray.h), with exception of the object name (a number is
used instead so a separate mapping to the name will be needed), so
extracting them should be fairly straightforward. 
 
Maybe this suffices as starting point ... off you go, and good luck of
course. And please tell me, if it works.

-- Carsten