[Bf-committers] Dithering

[Goran Kocov]

Hi everybody!

One of the biggest problems I have with Blender's
internal renderer is that it doesn't do any dithering
to the output while converting the floating point
values to 8-bit integer values, resulting in noticable
banding in some cases.

While it shouldn't be very hard to implement this, it
seems that it isn't high on the developers' priority
list, so I decided to try and implement it myself.
I've made some very simple changes to the renderer, to
the Struct-DNA and to the render output panel, and as
far as I can tell, (with dithering on) the banding is
pretty much nonexistant now. Also I've done some basic
testing both with stills and with animations and I
couldn't notice any bugs/problems. Check this topic on
the blender.org forums for example images 

http://www.blender.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=phpBB2&file=viewtopic&t=4837

Here's a patch made from the 27.10.2004 CVS (I've
never made a patch before, so be prepared for a bumpy
ride, sorry!). 

http://www.geocities.com/gkocov/misc/dither.patch.txt

If there are any problems with the patch there's a
tar.gz archive containing the original sources, the
changed sources and the differences between them (it's
from a slightly older CVS - 21.10.2004, but that
shouldn't be a big problem).

http://www.geocities.com/gkocov/misc/blender_dither_code.tar.gz

This is my first time working with Blender's code and
I don't have much C/C++ experience, so please be
gentle on me. :)

Goran


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