Hi all,
wich is the status of the photon map tool, developed by Roland Schregle?
At the ISE website i only found a beta version. Will there anywhen come up a
'stable' version?
Will there anywhen come up a more comfortable integration into Radiance, or will
it be compiled anywhen in the Radiance source?
Regards,
Stephan
Hi Stephan,
Forgive me if this had been answered already I am "disconnected" at the moment, have not checked my email in several hours and am just sitting down now to reply to some others, and will not send this till tomorrow, so the info may be a bit stale by then. The photon map tool was part of Roland's PhD, and AFAIK it's sort-of "stalled" right now, he's doing some validations and the like. Also, I believe it *is* stable. You might also wanna check out Francesco Anselmo's compiled source packages; you have the option of downloading the Radiance release with the photon map module, precompiled, in a variety of formats (.rpm, etc...) As far as future development, you'll have to talk to Roland...
Rob Guglielmetti
rpg@rumblestrip.org
www.rumblestrip.org
On Wednesday, September 24, 2003, at 05:40 AM, Weismann Stephan wrote:
Hi all,
wich is the status of the photon map tool, developed by Roland Schregle?
At the ISE website i only found a beta version. Will there anywhen come up a
'stable' version?
Will there anywhen come up a more comfortable integration into Radiance, or will
it be compiled anywhen in the Radiance source?
Rob Guglielmetti wrote:
Hi all,
wich is the status of the photon map tool, developed by Roland Schregle?
At the ISE website i only found a beta version. Will there anywhen come up a
'stable' version?
Will there anywhen come up a more comfortable integration into Radiance, or will
it be compiled anywhen in the Radiance source?Hi Stephan,
Forgive me if this had been answered already I am "disconnected" at the moment, have not checked my email in several hours and am just sitting down now to reply to some others, and will not send this till tomorrow, so the info may be a bit stale by then. The photon map tool was part of Roland's PhD, and AFAIK it's sort-of "stalled" right now, he's doing some validations and the like. Also, I believe it *is* stable. You might also wanna check out Francesco Anselmo's compiled source packages; you have the option of downloading the Radiance release with the photon map module, precompiled, in a variety of formats (.rpm, etc...) As far as future development, you'll have to talk to Roland...
I've all but ceased maintenance on the code and will release another patch revision in the coming weeks. That will probably be the final update for the foreseeable future, and it will mostly just fix a few bugs. I may include stuff to sample arbitrary BRDFs (simply because the code's already available and some people need that functionality), but it's insanely slow and thus of virtually no practical use. I now consider the code pretty much as stable as it can get -- of course I'm not ruling out minor bugs which only manifest themselves under rare circumstances, mainly because I never had a comprehensive suite of test scenes (that's why I rely on user feedback, and I acknowledge those who helped here).
As for the future, that decision lies in the ISE's hands. As I understand it, it's their code. I won't maintain it any longer after the next release (not for free anyway), and I'm not aware of any plans to continue its development at ISE, either. Plus this patching-to-by-now-outdated-official-release stuff is cumbersome and leaves us with a parallel code branch which is incompatible with the current HEAD release. Since there appear to be a number of fellas out there who actually *use* this thing (I'll be damned!), a long term solution must be found. In an ideal world, I'd like to see ISE hand the code over to the Berkeley crew so they can merge it with the official distribution and continue maintenance. I'm not sure what ISE's standpoint is on that, but they should seriously consider it. Maybe they can work something out with Berkeley. This world being anything but ideal however, I don't expect to see this anytime soon, and the pmap may ultimately fade into oblivion. Interested parties might want to get in touch with my project manager at ISE, Sebastian Herkel (herkel@ise.fhg.de), to inquire what's in store for the pmap.
See ya!
--Roland
On Wednesday, September 24, 2003, at 05:40 AM, Weismann Stephan wrote:
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