[Radiance-general] Re: Radiance workshop, etc.

[Carsten Bauer]

Hi Martin, 

some short comments to your suggestions:

> rview version of rpiece
would be a nice thing to have. Indeed, I already wrote something like
this (although not based on rpiece, but generally on a separate parallel
processing library (PVM)). The problem is, however, that the succesive
refining scheme of rview needs a lot of data shuffling when sending the
output of different processes to the display, so the parallel rview came
out really slooooooow, which is why I abandoned it and do parallel
processing only in rpict mode.

> easier application of picture mapping
try to include the picture/texture mapping and the object on which it is
mapped in one file. When placing this file with xform to an arbitrary
position and orientation, the mapping function gets transformed
automatically as well

> reliable smoothing functions
the smoothing option in e.g. gensurf (-s) works very well. I don't have
any experience in cases when polygon meshes are imported from CAD
programs, although I already thought about an independent smoothing
process which could be let loose on any given polygon set. 
Question: does the smoothing generally get lost when importing stuff
from, say, Autocad ?

> the ambient calculation..
well, there's no easy way to accomplish difficult tasks. Intricate
geometry demands a high sampling density, interpolation always is some
sort of 'secondary' measure which - no matter how sophisticated it is
performed - often reaches its limits rather soon . Nevertheless, I judge
your given settings to be very high. I had much succes in achieving
visually appealing images (judged not only by myself.. :) with far
lesser parameter settings. 

-Carsten