[Soc-2008-dev] Week 5 report

[Davide Vercelli]

Week 5
======

Last week
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Support for oriented lights: this allows to render area lights and
"instant radiosity"-like solutions. You still need to create this
lights yourself though.

Minor:
- a lot of code simplification
- Python API: added samplingMethod attribute to Lamp class (needed by
my still unreleased scripts)
- better feedback: lightcuts phases are printed to the infostr, and
tree building time is printed as well

Next week
---------
Last week I mentioned I wanted to distribute a couple of Python
scripts so that people could test environment maps and area lights.
But the scripts I've used so far are very hackish and Blender tends to
slow down a great deal when dealing with thousands of lights in 3d
view, especially oriented lights that require a lot of additional
drawing; so right now I'm not sure if it's worth the trouble to polish
them. As Kent suggested, it could be better to code some C code
directly, maybe improving it later. I think I'm going to change my
plans and will do this next week; support for specularity and diffuse
lighting will come afterwards.

Verifiable targets for next week:
1 - area lights render correctly through lightcuts without explicitly
converting them beforehand
2 - environment maps render correctly through lightcuts without
explicitly converting them beforehand

Last week I also mentioned an unrelated feature (a way to save
multiple rendering layers in a single click even for formats that
don't support layers); this is still on my TODO list but I won't
promise any schedule for it.

Issues
------
Same as last week: artifacts show up in some tests: I still have to
look into that. Hopefully with more testing going on I will have more
feedback also on those.

Schedule
--------
I slightly changed my mind on my previous schedule: my aim was to
support all shader types before the middle evaluation term. I still
think that that's both desirable and doable, but I also think that
light conversion is on a higher priority.

Cheers

Davide