[Radiance-general] Photon Map?

[Roland Schregle]

Rob Guglielmetti wrote:
> 
> On Wednesday, September 24, 2003, at 05:40 AM, Weismann Stephan wrote:
> 
>> Hi all,
>>
>> wich is the status of the photon map tool, developed by Roland Schregle?
>> At the ISE website i only found a beta version. Will there anywhen 
>> come up a
>> 'stable' version?
>> Will there anywhen come up a more comfortable integration into 
>> Radiance, or will
>> it be compiled anywhen in the Radiance source?
> 
> 
> Hi Stephan,
> 
> Forgive me if this had been answered already I am "disconnected" at the 
> moment, have not checked my email in several hours and am just sitting 
> down now to reply to some others, and will not send this till tomorrow, 
> so the info may be a bit stale by then.  The photon map tool was part of 
> Roland's PhD, and AFAIK it's sort-of "stalled" right now, he's doing 
> some validations and the like.  Also, I believe it *is* stable.  You 
> might also wanna check out Francesco Anselmo's compiled source packages; 
> you have the option of downloading the Radiance release with the photon 
> map module, precompiled, in a variety of formats (.rpm, etc...)  As far 
> as future development, you'll have to talk to Roland...

I've all but ceased maintenance on the code and will release another 
patch revision in the coming weeks. That will probably be the final 
update for the foreseeable future, and it will mostly just fix a few 
bugs. I may include stuff to sample arbitrary BRDFs (simply because the 
code's already available and some people need that functionality), but 
it's insanely slow and thus of virtually no practical use. I now 
consider the code pretty much as stable as it can get -- of course I'm 
not ruling out minor bugs which only manifest themselves under rare 
circumstances, mainly because I never had a comprehensive suite of test 
scenes (that's why I rely on user feedback, and I acknowledge those who 
helped here).

As for the future, that decision lies in the ISE's hands. As I 
understand it, it's their code. I won't maintain it any longer after the 
next release (not for free anyway), and I'm not aware of any plans to 
continue its development at ISE, either. Plus this 
patching-to-by-now-outdated-official-release stuff is cumbersome and 
leaves us with a parallel code branch which is incompatible with the 
current HEAD release. Since there appear to be a number of fellas out 
there who actually *use* this thing (I'll be damned!), a long term 
solution must be found. In an ideal world, I'd like to see ISE hand the 
code over to the Berkeley crew so they can merge it with the official 
distribution and continue maintenance. I'm not sure what ISE's 
standpoint is on that, but they should seriously consider it. Maybe they 
can work something out with Berkeley. This world being anything but 
ideal however, I don't expect to see this anytime soon, and the pmap may 
ultimately fade into oblivion. Interested parties might want to get in 
touch with my project manager at ISE, Sebastian Herkel 
(herkel@ise.fhg.de), to inquire what's in store for the pmap.

See ya!

--Roland


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