v0.97 Preview Ready (With ART Ray Tracer!)

[Steve]

I have posted a new preview, v0.97.  It's main feature is a ray tracer called ART (for Anim8or Ray Tracer, naturally!)  Check out the "v0.97 Preview" link in the menu or just click here: http://www.anim8or.com/download/preview/index.html  Don't miss the ray tracer documentation either:  http://www.anim8or.com/download/preview/art_raytracer.html

Here's an example of just one new thing you can do with it:

[blanc]

hello
Is it possible to combine two class for one material ?

example : glossyreflector and transparent

[blanc]

Oops! I spoke too soon!

Actually, glossyreflector + transparent = dielectric ! no ?

[blanc]

I was going to forget!
Congratulation to the new version
It is fast approaching the version 1

[floyd86]

Thank you steve. This is what Anim8or needed: again one step closer to perfect realism in anim8or. With this new option our renders will look so cool. Keep up the good work.

[Kubajzz]

Oops! I spoke too soon!

Actually, glossyreflector + transparent = dielectric ! no ?

I don't think so. Dielectric class is quite similar to transparent, but has nothing to do with reflections;

The difference between tranparent and dielectric is how the light interacts with the colorof the material

If you have 'transparent' material with transparency 0, it behaves like clean glass (the material color has no effect); dielectric material with transparency 0 is not transparent - it's almost transparent where the object is very thin and it's less transparent where the object is thick (depending on the UnitDistance attribute...) - that is useful for liquids etc...

[CobraSpectre]

Thank you Steve!

Hmm, released the same day I was going to start surfacing and lighting a Transform entry for anim8or.org...

One question, can objects cast colored, refracted 'shadows'?

[hihosilver]

You're an amazing person Steve
Wonderful job on this release.  We just finished our unit on refractions with mirrors and transparent surfaces in physics and I loved the course.  This kind of stuff is very interesting.  I'll be playing with this all spring break!

[Steve]

blanc - no, you can't combine materials - yet.  I  plan to add more materials and options to both the scanline renderer and to the ray tracer.  One possibility is to add more complex operateor - like a blend option that would aallow you to combine two or more materials.  Another is to allow various components like the specular hilight to be a general material.  There ar some major design issues I have to work out first including how to present this to users.  Attributes are quite flexible but not very easy to use ao I'd like another technique.

CobraSpectre - No colored shadows yet either but they are in the works.  Caustics are much harder to do (and can take a LOT more time) so I don't think I'll get to them anytime soon.

There ther's the current rendering time.  I haven't done much to speed it up yet.  I hope to be able to at least halve the time for a typical render.

[Raxx]

Another is to allow various components like the specular hilight to be a general material.  There ar some major design issues I have to work out first including how to present this to users.  Attributes are quite flexible but not very easy to use ao I'd like another technique.

This is more work for you, but easier for us: How about some sort of "Shader Lab" dialog option from the material editor. This dialog would be a wizard of sorts with a preview window, where you can add and mix attributes from a drop down menu and play with values. Press the preview button and the preview window renders a sample (some primitives on a plane or something ). I think this will make it much easier and faster for new and old users to make custom materials. If you extend the attributes to include all the bump map values and textures and such, you could even replace the entire material editor with the shader version using a toggle for ART materials versus scanline materials.

Just a thought.

[hihosilver]

I completely agree with Raxx's idea there.  It would be nice to have a simple pull-down with things like 'class' and 'specular' then a subsection with the different classes they have.  Those would then have input values that you could put in and preview as he said.

[Steve]

I agree and would have something like that already except that it takes a bit of time to write.  Also since I plan on adding mode ray traced materials it would take more effort to keep updating all that dialog code.  If I wait until the features are more stable I'll have a better idea what to do.  (Plus I wanted to get the ray tracer out for feedback instead of waiting until it was "finished".)

I also want to write a material manager to allow you to move materials between objects, projects, whatever.

[flametiger74]

THIS IS SO COOL!!!!
Question?
You said that your going to make a material organizer, but what about the actual material properties? will they be easy to understand. Like a # from 0.001 to 1 or something like that or something more complicated. B/c I found that in other 3d programs to get reflection is so hard or annoying like in a horrible place in the program (blender) or just with a million properties.
Right now I looked at the 0.97 .exe and all the properties are in the attributes. Now I'm not really sure how that works and when I opened up a sample file with reflection it didn't show or render any reflection.
Thanks
Edit: never mind. I forgot to put the renderer to ART Ray Tracer
But really will it be less confusing to add reflection in a later release.
Also, Can you say any idea when anything stable or Beta will be out.
I can't wait for this to come out.
I'll finally be able to make that water reflection I've been wanting to do.
Thanks!

[hihosilver]

Honestly I feel this is much more stable than v0.95
There are more bugs that have been fixed in this version, and so far from what I've seen there are no rendering bugs.

[cfive]

(0+O) OOH! RAYTRACING! Bet that took a long time! AAnyway, congrats!