[Soc-2008-dev] Week 8 report

[Davide Vercelli]

Week 8
======

This week
---------
I have not met my targets this week, my sincere apologies for that.
This is because I overestimated the time I could spend on the project
during a scheduled visit to my relatives. This was an isolated event
though and will not affect future schedules. (My mentor is aware of
the situation.)

Anyway this does not mean I've not done any work at all. In particular
I continued to work on the (popular) textured area light feature by
adding full support to texture channels, size, offsets, stencils, etc.
and switching the sampling code to 2d plane hammersley.

Moreover I fixed a number of bugs, including a pretty serious one
preventing different light types from working together (I guess
testers tended to test different kinds of lighting separately).

Next week
---------
Same verifiable targets as last week: add support for all diffuse
types. Again, I have yet to look into the code, so some of them may
turn out to be not easily boundable and thus not really "supported" in
the end.

Issues
------
Sometimes calling shadeSkyView returns all black pixels. When this
happens, it follows some strange patterns. For instance, the first
rendering is black, the second is not. Maybe it's my fault and I
should call some preliminary update function that I don't know of? Or
is it an arcane Blender bug? If some guru has some insight to share on
this, please let me know.

Schedule
--------
I'm slightly later than expected, but still optimistic about future
deadlines. Let me restate again that I expect july to be slower paced
than august.

Davide