[Soc-2008-dev] Week 6 report

[Davide Vercelli]

Week 6
======

Last week
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Met last week's verifiable targets:
1 - area lights render correctly through lightcuts without explicitly
converting them beforehand
2 - environment maps render correctly through lightcuts without
explicitly converting them beforehand

Both features are still a bit rough though and require some fiddling
with UI parameters. The intensity of the equivalent area lights is not
matched automatically yet. Environment maps are sampled through a
hammersley sequence, while they could benefit from importance driven
sampling. Still, it's now possible to play with lightcuts without
having nasty & hackish python scripts in the way, and without having
hundreds of lights cluttering the outliner and the 3d view (not to
mention the huge savings in file sizes).

I also added support for Phong specularity. It hasn't been tested
throroughly though.

I also started writing a midterm report:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:UncleZeiv/SummerOfCode2008/Midterm
Please note: it's still work in progress, but I plan to finish it
(adding some new pictures as well) by sunday, in time for the meeting.

Next week
---------
Let's consider the Phong specularity part advance code from next week
:) Seriously I'll probably be very busy at work, so I don't plan to do
any commits. In my spare time though I would like to analyse some test
scenes that don't render as expected.

Until sunday, as said, I'll also work on the midterm report.

Issues
------
This week's features still require lots of testing.

Schedule
--------
The schedule looks good. I would say all the major parts of the work
are "in place" now from an architectural point of view (excluding the
indirect lighting proof of concept). From now on it will get more and
more a matter of polishing.

Davide