[Radiance-general] Slow rendering with transparant textures

[Lars O. Grobe]

> Does this make sense?

Yes, it does ;-) thank you for the explanation Greg! You know that I 
have a model making rather intensive use of textures here (the Hagia 
Sophia model), and I was wondering if there were some techniques to 
apply for a speed-up. But as we do not combine cal-files at all, just 
map one image per object, I do not see such a possibility any more. It 
might make sense to have simplified colorpict modifiers doing the most 
frequently used transformations hard-coded, without calling to the 
cal-file interpreter - e.g. a colorpictxy, colorpict xz and colorpict yz 
modifier which would allow to do all mapping in orthogonal models 
without cal-files. But it would break e.g. xform for such modifiers, and 
create a mess in the scene language while few models really have a 
problem with too many mappings. So we have to live with slow mappings ;-)

BTW, as it is related to textures and came to my mind some days ago - it 
should be quite doable to modify the source of mkillum in a way that it 
outputs polygons with a prerendered ambient calculation mapped onto 
them, right? It would be one step towards a nice vrml/x3d-export from 
radiance scenes, as the x3d- / vrml-viewer could render the direct 
light, while the view-point independent ambient calculation would be 
left to radiance. The only problem would be the need of correct surface 
normals for the whole model.


CU Lars.