Anim8or Community

Yes, there is a GetNumPoints() call and a GetPoint() call which allow you to enumerate all of the points, but there is no GetNumEdges() or GetEdge() call.  I have a batch of these and other functions that were missed in the original ASL release almost ready to make available.

The GetEdge() call is (will be) done with GetEdgeIndex0(int edgeIndex) and GetEdgeIndex1(int edgeIndex) to get the point number and GetEdgePoint0/1() to return the value of the vertex because GetEdgeIndex() is already defined to return the edge within a face.

With luck the next v0.97 preview will be ready in a week or so.  Without luck it will be a week or so into May because I'll be out of town.

The properties of dielectric materials are well understood in the field of physics.  There are long standing mathematical madels that explain their behavior when interacting with, for example, light.  Thus they are well suited to ray tracing.  Glass, water, quartz, diamond and many plastics are example of dielectric materials that you can use for more realistic models.  Opaque dialectrics like ceramics are best modeled with simpler materials because they are much faster to render.

Yes, there are a lot of things left to do to make materials match all of the scanline render's capabilities.

wannabe67 is no longer welcome in these forums due to this and other transgressions.  Plagiarisma and bad language have no place here.   I appreciate those of you who clicked on the "Report to moderator" link when they read his posts.

Steve

I wahted to update everyone on this.  I suspect that these problems have something to do with the shadow bias that the raytracer uses to prevent self shadowing artifacts.  I'm still looking into the problem.

Yes, I'll probably remove this.  Maybe I'll try and make an Anim8or project with some of the test cases in it.

The ray tracer wasn't designed to handle two sided materials.  Toon shadiing using one sided shells isn't physically consistent so I'm not sure it would work as well with a ray tracer.

This rendering artifact is caused by an inconsistency in the geometry and shading of your object.  Ray tracing is based on modeling a physical world.  The only 100% correct way to do ray tracing is to model all triangles as flat faces.  When smooth shading is used (like in Anim8or) you are essentially lying to the ray tracer.  The surface is not smoothly curved and yet you want it to appear that it is.  So ther ray tracer distorts the normal used for lighting.  This is inconsistent.

The scanline renderer is able to avoid much of this problem by moving the shadows backwards into the object.  It is not perfect and works OK as long as you can't see the back (like with reflections).  There is even a parameter that you can set to control how far to push the shadows.  That hack doesn't work so well for ray tracing.

The best way to avoid these artifacts is to use more faces on curved surfaces (by subdivision or simply setting the polygon count higher for a parameteric object like a sphere).