We have an official set of 6.0 installers now uploaded at:
We haven’t made an official release in a while, let alone a major one. Here are some of the significant additions from src/notes/ReleaseNotes:
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Version 6.0
Extensive changes to enable spectral rendering, which defaults to “off”
to maintain backwards-compatibility with previous versions, with the
exception of the ambient file format, which is changed. The MAXCSAMP
macro, which defaults to 24, sets the maximum number of spectral samples.
The actual number of samples is set by the “-cs” option, which defaults
to 3 for rpict, rtrace, and rcontrib. The latter two programs support
straight spectral output, but rpict is initially restricted to
tristimulus output pictures. New pattern primitives “spectrum”,
“specfile”, and “specfunc” have been added as a means to specify
spectral reflectance, emittance, etc. to materials that still have
only 3 color channels. Those RGB channels will still affect the
spectrum if used. Unfortunately photon-mapping is currently broken when
spectral sampling is enabled, but we will fix this as soon as possible.
Calculation overhead appears to be approximately 10-15% for RGB
renderings compared to version 5.4a.
Added new utility, rcomb, which is something like a combination
of rmtxop and pcomb, it works with all the inputs and
outputs that rmtxop handles, but allows for general expressions
like those in pcomb for putting matrices together, working on
an element at a time. (No resizing of matrices or accessing
neighboring elements, as permitted in pcomb.) It saves memory
over rmtxop by operating on a row at a time, so can handle
input and output matrices with any number of rows. It does
provide for a single matrix-multiplication operation at the end,
which only requires memory for that final matrix.
Added new “specdata” and “specpict” primitives to support
interpolated spectral data files and hyperspectral images
as patterns.
Added ability of mgf2rad to convert spectral data at least
for light, glow, plastic, and metal primitive types. Need
to use new ‘-s’ option to get new output. Added support for
new WGMDfunc type as well, which is considerably more flexible
at supporting different spectral components.
Taoning Wang added genssky tool for generating spectral sky
descriptions.
Taoning added gensdaymtx utility based on gendaymtx, and
added epw2wea -a option to include required information.
Wrote rxpiece tool that will render pictures using tiling and
can handle different output formats and hyperspectral pictures.
Only runs on a single machine, however – no NFS locking on
shared volumes. Mainly a demonstration tool for RpictSimulManager
C++ class, but later added to standard Rmakefile targets.
Added WGMDfunc material type with programmable roughness and
separate modifier paths for the different components.
Added ability of gendaymtx to read EPW as well as WEA files.
When EPW input is provided, the 3-hour average dew point is
used to compute a more accurate precipitable water content
value. It currently does not use these data directly from
the EPW input, relying instead on a dew-point-to-W calculation.
This follows the request and recommendations of David G-M.
Taoning Wang updated genssky and gensdaymtx to provide illuminance
calibration and accept EPW files directly as input.
Wrote new pvsum tool to handle cases dctimestep can’t, like
spectral input pictures. It also adds a -N option for multi-
processing on Unix machines, which utilizes memory-mapped
inputs for efficient i/o sharing.
Added -e expr and -f file.cal options to all rendering tools, not
just rcontrib/rxcontrib. Feature request from Peter A-B.
Added genglaze tool created by Taoning Wang to generate
spectral glazing materials based on CGDB data and models.
Created bsdfpeaks utility to identify and report full-width,
half-maximum sizes of peaks in SIR and XML inputs.
Fixed problem with “mirror” primitive, which was not permitting
indirect rays to transmit through alternate material type.
Thanks to Jon Sargent for finding problem and help resolving it.