[Radiance-general] Re: pmap

[Axel Jacobs]

> > I believe the latest iteration of pmap is the module Carsten integrated
> > with his Radzilla, yes.  Haven't heard from Roland in a while...

> I found that there is even no pmap for 3.8? The learnix-distribution
> mentions that pmap is not supported any more in their radiance set-up
> and available only in radzilla (which is in learnix)

I contacted Jan over pmap when I started working on the latest LEARNIX
around September last year. He was very busy at the time (and probably
still is) with his PhD. He was about to talk to their programmer about
some minor changes he liked to see implemented in pmap on top of the
obvious adjustments necessary to move it from Radiance 3.7 to 3.8. Seems
that Jan has just been too busy.

Carsten Bauer was kind enough to tweak the 3.7 pmap so it would compile
with 3.8. I did, however, decide not to ship it with LEARNIX since it was
not officially endorsed by the maintainer. This tough decision was
eased by the fact that one or two of the test routines shipping with pmap
failed.

As regards to Radzilla (radzilla/RADZILLA ???) -- There are three types of
photons in pmap, of which Carsten implements two. Don't ask me what they
are and when you need them. I guess that the third, unimplemented type is
not used very often, otherwise it would probably be there in Radzilla.

Because of LEARNIX, I have been following the progression of RZ very
closely and am pleased to report that it has improved tremendously over
the last 6 months. However, one thing that you always must remember is
that RZ is a complete re-write of Radiance 'classic' in C++. While the
algorithms are obviously the same, RZ has not seen as much bug-testing and
validation as 'Classic' has enjoyed over the years. This is also true for
the pmap plug-in. I am not saying that RZ is buggy, but it might be an
issue. Carten actually considers RZ 'alpha'.

So, to cut a long story short: Unless you go back to R 3.7, there is no
'official' pmap for Radiance. I would personally very much like to see
pmap integrated into the main Radiance tree and available with the same
download, but there are probably issues (license, maintainership, coding
style etc.) that have prevented this from happening. So far, anyhow.

Axel