[Radiance-general] Announcing Radiance 3.7 release

[Gregory J. Ward]

Hi Ian,

> Greg Ward wrote:
>> Added -pd option to handle depth-of-field blur in rpict.  This  
>> requires
>> that the view directon (-vd option) include focal distance  
>> information,
>> which is now preserved by the various view file routines, and  
>> reported
>> by the vwright command.
>
> From the man page, this new feature completely replaces pdfblur. So  
> there's no need to render multiple images and average them  
> together? I haven't seen any other mention of this new feature.  
> Does rpict simply trace multiple rays for the one pixel?

It's not a complete replacement, as pdfblur is quite a bit faster.   
Also, rpict will not as a rule send multiple samples per pixel.  To  
get such a behavior, you have to increase the initial image  
resolution and downsample more with pfilt.

Similar to motion blur, best results are usually obtained through a  
combination of pdfblur and the new -pd option.  There is also a new  
script to do combined motion and depth-of-field blur, as the two are  
not really separable.  It's called pmdblur, and it's man page is the  
best place to get details.

Thanks is due to Jack de Valpine of Visarc, who funded this addition,  
along with support in ranimate that now provides motion and depth-of- 
field blurring as an option.

> Does it adapt e.g points in focus only require a few rays, but  
> points out of focus require more rays over the area of confusion  
> (or whatever it's called) ?
> That would improve the efficiency/speed over the laborious pdfblur  
> method.

The technique is not adaptive, but it takes advantage along with  
everything else of rpict's selective rendering of samples based on  
image coherence (the -ps and -pt options).

-Greg