[Soc-2008-dev] Week 4 report

[Davide Vercelli]

Week 4
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Last week
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Added support for directional lights. This required changing the
existing code in order to deal with more than one tree (each light
type has its own tree): this turned out way easier than I thought!

By the way, it's now possible to render from environment maps - right
now you need to convert the lights yourself though.

Next week
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Support for oriented lights: light types would be all in place.
Start adding support for other diffuse shaders and specular shaders.

For testers: temporarily distribute a Python script to convert
environment maps into lights. Later this will be recoded in C but I
prefer to take the time to implement importance sampling for that.

Unrelated feature (actually I just hope that Matt tells me this is
already there): a way to save multiple rendering layers in a single
click, but for formats that don't support layers. That is, save N png
files for instance (like: basename_###.png where ### gets substituted
with the layer name).

Issues
------
Artifacts show up in some tests: I am aware of this and I have several
ideas on what could be going on and how to cope with them. Right now
though I'll head towards a more complete feature set.

Schedule
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My aim is now to support all light types and shader types before the
middle evaluation term. I feel perfectly on track for that.

Cheers

Davide