Anim8or Community

Good catch!  I'm posting a quick fix for the 1-frame scene crash in a few minutes and I'll fix this one too.

No problem.

Can you send it again?  I though I had saved it but now I can't find where I put it!!!

Heh heh.  I knew it would be useful for *something*!

In addition the the version() function that returns a string, I'm adding a int VERSION predefined constant that will just have the numeric part of the version.  V0.97 would have a value of 97.  It won't help here because it would not compile on earlier versions of Anim8or but it may make similar work arounds easier in the future.

Tanzim, yes I have thought about rewriting Anim8or.  I've learned a lot writing it.  But before I seriously consider doing that I want to finish a few more things in the current version, mostly directed at improving the animation tools but other things too.  It could take a long to me to get a new version working!

Nice work, onespirit5777.  Transparent dielectric materials can generate dozens or even hundreds of rays for eacy primary ray.  That's why they take so long to render.  I'm working on an optimization or two to help speed that up but it will never be as fast as, say, reflections.  As for caustics direct rendering of them is much slower than dielectrics so I won't be adding that.  Light maps do a good job but that's now how ART renders.

Wa-hoo!  I found a subtle but serious problem with the fundamental way that Anim8or generates samples.  Single samples are fine but they can become correlated with subsequent samples of the same value.  For example, a reflected surface samples lights twice, once on the original hit and once on the surface hit by the reflection.  Correlated samples are bad because the loose some of their "randomness" and can appear as many kind of artifacts.  This happens in the Reflective Egg example when the number of samples is a multiple of 4 (like 4, 16, 36) but not nearly as much at other numbers (9, 25, 49) though it still can happen.

I've fixed the problem