Otherware/Otherware_1_SB_Development.iso/amiga/video/render/radiance.lzh/ray/doc/notes/ReleaseNotes

Text File | 1991-11-10 | 13KB | 286 lines

=========================
Version 1.2

Added a -p option to rpict and pfilt to set the pixel aspect ratio for
output.  Instead of giving the absolute x and y resolutions, the user
now gives rpict and pfilt the maximum desired resolution for x and y
and the pixel aspect ratio is used along with the given view to
calculate appropriate values within this boundary.  This makes for
much more natural view specifications.  For example, for a 512x400
device with a pixel aspect ratio of 1.0, the pfilt command:

    pfilt -x 512 -y 400 -p 1

will always produce the appropriate output, regardless of the aspect
ratio of the input picture.  If necessary, the x or y output resolution
will be reduced to accommodate the device's resolution.  A square image
would occupy a region of 400x400 pixels.

View shift and lift options were added to the list of standard view
parameters, for specifying views for panoramas and holograms.

Rview no longer takes options for x and y resolution, but instead
gets them from the device driver along with the pixel ratio.  This
makes it much easier to change the view aspect ratio (with the vh
and vv parameters).

A -z option was added to rpict to write out the distances for each
pixel in an image.  This may be useful for z-buffer operations, and
is used by the new program pinterp, described below.

A program called pinterp was added to the burgeoning list of
picture filters and converters.  This program is designed primarily
to interpolate animated frames for walk-throughs of static scenes,
but it has a number of other useful functions besides.  It takes as
its input one or more rendered pictures (with their corresponding z
value files) and desired viewpoint (hopefully not too far afield from
the given images).  Pinterp then takes the input frames and moves the
pixels to their new computed location.  Filling operations make sure
that the final image does not have large unpainted regions.

Added smoothing option to gensurf, using bilinear Phong surface normal
interpolation.  Not perfect, but it's better than nothing and permits
the use of fewer polygons to represent smoothly curved surfaces.

=========================
Version 1.3

Added conversion utility for IES (Illuminating Engineering Society) standard
format luminaire data.  The translator, called ies2rad, takes any number
of luminaire data files and creates the necessary Radiance geometric
descriptions and data files and puts them in the specified library location.
A new data format was added to accommodate irregularly-spaced data points.

Added rview driver for NeWS for Sun and Silicon Graphics workstations.

Fixed oconv for scenes with many overlapping instances (runs faster now).

Added consitency checks intended to detect stale octrees without restricting
changes to surface modifiers.  (But you still can't change total number of
objects).  Stale octrees caused some of the strangest behavior...

Finally broke down and wrote my own malloc(3) routines.  There is a
CalTech module floating around Berkeley that caused a lot of trouble
for bmalloc(), resulting in about twice the needed memory use.

Added translator for Architrion.  Arch2rad uses mapping rules to assign
materials to surfaces from input file.  This is a general method (dreamed
up by Charles Ehrlich) that allows users to assign materials based on
whatever information is available from the CAD file.  See the accompanying
description file on translators in the ray/doc/notes directory.

Added fisheye view types to rpict and rview, useful for looking at
entire scenes and for LEEP virtual reality wide field stereo viewer.

Wrote xshowtrace, a fun program for watching rays as they are being
traced on an X11 display.

Write ra_pr24 for converting between 24-bit Sun rasterfiles and
Radiance pictures.  Perhaps this should be incorporated in ra_pr, as
ra_t8 and ra_t16 should be one program, but the algorithms and memory
requirements are totally different for colormapped images.

Added routines for performing 24-bit gamma correction in integer domain,
making programs like ra_pr24 and ra_t16 run faster.

=========================
Version 1.4

Fixed bug in IES translator that resulted in the incorrect
interpretation of type B photometric data.  (1.3.1)

Added types for using BRDF data:  plasfunc, metfunc, plasdata and metdata.

Added interpretation of source color to ies2rad and color corrective
filtering to pfilt.  Reference file used by both is "lamp.tab" in
library directory.

Added picture flipping program, pflip, and pattern preprocessing script,
normpat.csh, to the px directory.

Fixed bug in ra_pr24 that caused the reversal of red and blue values.
New version accepts both RT_STANDARD and RT_FORMAT_RGB files but
produces only RT_STANDARD rasterfiles as output.

Added -m option to xform to change modifiers for surfaces.

Wrote replmarks program to replace markers in a Radiance scene file
for light sources or other objects.

Added global compilation script, makeall.

Fixed calculation of luminance in display programs and gensky to use
white light assumption.

Added options and features to pcomb.

Added FORMAT= line to all Radiance file headers for improved error
checking and clarity.

Added icon bitmaps for rview and x11image under X11 and fixed a bug
that caused x11image to ignore keyboard input.

****** COMPATIBILITY CHANGE ********
Added constant definitions to cal files using ':' instead of '='.
This makes for faster calculations since many more constant
expressions can be reduced at "compile" time.

Created glare calculation programs in util directory.  Findglare locates
glare sources, xglaresrc circles sources on a displayed image, and
glarendx computes various glare indices.

=========================
Version 2.0

Added -i option to renderers for computing irradiance rather than
radiance.  Eliminated redundant -oI option from rtrace and added
-I option to replace old -oi.  This hack ignores glass and similar
surfaces during the calculation.

Changed icon for x11image (renamed ximage) to miniature bitmap of
picture.

Fixed bug in xshowtrace that prevented it from working with twm.

Added memory recovery feature to rview so that when it refines
itself out of memory it doesn't quit but instead gives the user
a command line saying "out of memory:", which allows the output to
be written and so forth before quitting or restarting the image.

Added -g (gamma correction) option to pvalue.

Added the more general BRTDfunc for procedural definition of bidirectional
reflectance-transmittance distribution functions.  Also added transfunc
and transdata types.

Changed trans types to modify the color of the transmitted specular
component.

Fixed a bug in ra_t16 introduced in the last change which caused
problems for the (default) 16-bit output mode.

Improved Monte Carlo sampling for penumbras (-dj) and ambient
super-samples (-as) using stratified random number sequence introduced
by Christophe Schlick at '91 Eurographics workshop on rendering.

Wrote falsecolor program to transform images to false color with
value labels.

Modified pcomb to allow different output sizes and access to local
pixel neighborhood for specialty filtering applications.

Made cone and sphere routines more forgiving of negative radii,
switching between inverted types as necessary and giving warning
messages instead of bombing.  Cones with equal radii are now
silently converted into cylinders.  Hopefully, these changes will
make writing Radiance scene file translators a little bit easier.
Unfortunately, we still bomb for zero-sized cones and spheres.

Wrote a program called getbbox that just computes the bounding box
for a set of Radiance scene files.  It is basically a modified version
of oconv that doesn't store objects in memory and doesn't care about
undefined modifiers.

Added -a and -l options to pcompos and made both pcompos and pcomb
read from commands as well as files.

Substantially improved the accuracy and appearance of the interreflection
calculation by computing gradients at the same time as primary values and
then using a first order interpolation scheme.  This affects the information
stored in ambient files, so old files will have to be thrown away.

Added secondary light sources from planar mirror, prismatic and
holographic surfaces.  This created the new options -dr (direct relays)
and -dp (direct presample density) to the renderers.  The document
secsrc.note describes this feature in greater detail.

Put many of the routines into a common library.

Wrote a replacement for makedist, called mkillum, which generates
light distribtuions and illum descriptions for windows, skylights,
etc. in a much more natural and automatic fashion.

Fixed long-standing bug in text routines which caused slanted text
to slant the wrong way!

Added -e option to ra_bn, ra_pr, ra_pr24, ra_t8 and ra_t16 programs
for faster and more convenient image conversion w/o using pfilt.

****** COMPATIBILITY CHANGE ********
Finally added contexts to calcomp routines so identical names in
different function files no longer conflict.  Loading of function
files also works automatically without those nasty "key" variables.
New context marks (backquote characters) appear in some local variables
defined in some of the cal files.  This is inconsistent with older
versions, and must be changed back to and underscore or some other legal
character if these files are used by 1.4 and earlier.

Wrote ra_tiff program, using Sam Leffler's libtiff package to read
and write 24-bit TIFF images.

Wrote ra_ppm program to convert to and from Poskanzer Pixmaps.

****** COMPATIBILITY CHANGE ********
Changed run-length encoding of Radiance pictures to gain better
compression.  Routines can still read old format, but new ra_rgbe
program must be used to write convert images to a more generic format
that can be read by release 1.4 and earlier.

Defined U and V parameters in rayinit.cal for more convenient (and
sloppy) use of 2-dimensional textures and patterns on planar surfaces.

Beefed up lampcolor program to compute spectral radiance for diffuse
emitters.  This was a previously a pain in the butt and a serious
source of error for scenes not modeled using IES data files.

Added version reporting to rpict, rtrace and rview.  Use standalone
-version option.

Changed to quincunx initial sampling pattern in rpict.  This should
reduce artifacts from adaptive image sampling at no added cost.

Added -rgb option to ra_pr24 to produce RT_FORMAT_RGB files.

Added -ds option to renderers to make source sampling more accurate
for large area sources.  It is no longer necessary or recommended
to break large sources (such as windows) into smaller pieces with
gensurf unless their output distribution changes over their surface.
Also, cylinders can now be used as light sources, provided they are not
too short compared to their radius (causing them to be frequently missed).

Added -I option to xform to invert surfaces.

Added SMLFLT and BIGMEM defines to better control the sizes of data
structures during compilation.  Made their setting relatively
straightforward in makeall and created a separate rmake program to
hold the options generated by makeall.

Made the programs more forgiving of machine differences on octrees.

****** COMPATIBILITY CHANGE ********
Fixed incorrect conversion factor between radiance and luminance.
The correct luminous efficacy value is now defined in color.h as
WHTEFFICACY.  It was 470 lumens/watt previously, now it has been
corrected to 179 lumens/watt.  This affects the absolute values
in the output of programs like gensky and ies2rad.  Thus, these
programs should be rerun to generate corrected files for this
version of Radiance.  Also, the new versions of display programs
like ximage will give different values with the 'l' command on
an image generated with 1.4 and previous releases.  The following
alias may be used to fix the radiance values in a picture generated
using previous versions of gensky and ies2rad:

alias pfixabs '( echo EXPOSURE=.381 ; cat \!:1 ) > \!:1.$$ ; mv \!:1.$$ \!:1'

Improved accuracy of glass material type and added option for
user-supplied index of refraction.

Added sgi to rt/Makefile and px/Makefile SPECIAL category for compiling
Isaac Kwo's NeWS driver for rview and the glimage program by Jim Winget.
Also fixed various compile problems for the SGI.

Improved handling of alternate scanline orientations.  The programs
pflip and protate (used to be prot) now affect the scanline ordering
of the file without messing up the view parameters for programs like
pinterp and findglare.