Anim8or Community

Flametiger74 - Please post this kind of thing to a new topic.  This thread simply anounces that v0.97 is available.  It is not for bug reports.  (What graphics card do you have?  THis is most certainly a driver problem, possible a badly designed driver.  That's exctly why I added the ability to turn off renders.)

Tanzim - That is a well documented problem with volume shadows in the scanline renderer.  Use the ray traced shadows options to fix it.

As I understand it, CobraSpectre's bug report is about the new ART Ray tracer (which is the only one that supports 4xaa.)

The ART ray tracer does not match the scanline renderer exactly and never will.  It is based on a more accurate physical model of light that the scanline renderer, which takes a lot of shortcuts and adds it's own rules.  For example a local light's min and max radius are a hack, not on how real light works, and aren't supported by the ray tracer.
Depth and alpha channel aren't doen yet so I'll probably disable those until they work.


The volume shadow bug with the horizontal lines is know (this is with the scanline renderer, right?  It's not clear which renderer you are talking about on some of these bugs).  You need to use ray traced shadows for these cases.

Yes, that's a bug.  The scanline renderer's shadwos don't work on the ground grid.  I'll fix it.

Good idea.  I haven't done that yet because I'd need to do some restructuring of the code to support multi-threaded renderenig.  Otherwise Anim8or would stall while the images were being updated each time you made a minor change.  This is even more true with the ray tracer for especially transparent materals. I thought about adding a "View Material" button you could click to do the render but that seems kind of clunky.

That looks like a bug.  If you can reproduce it with a simpler example can you send it to me?  (Or even the full project but that's harder to debug

Yes, I'll be adding diffuse textures to glossyreflection, as well as bumpmaps and probebly a couple of others.  Its a lot of code to write and test for all these cases so it may take a while.  I wanted to get something out for people to play with instead of waiting until it was all done :-)

Antialiasing is done iquite differently in the ray tracer and the scanline renderers.

The scanline renderer always uses a 4x4 grid of samples per pixel with all the samples in 4 rows and 4 columns.  This is why it's so fast - many of the computations are done once per image instead of per pixel or per sample.  But even samples are very bad for soft shadows.  So for soft shadows multiple shadow samples are takes for each image sample.  First a few samples are taken.  If any of them are different (i.e. one is in a shadow and one is not) then that pixel and the neighboring ones are samples a higher number of times.  This allows a high number of samples to be used on shadow edges and fewer in areas that they aren't needed because they're all the same.

The ray tracer uses just one shadow sample per image sample.  But because each sample is independently traced a better distribution can be done.  Multijitrered is a very good method - much better than random or Monte Carlo.  Likewise glossy surfaces trace just one sample per pixel.  That's why non-aa glossy surfaces are so speckled.  Over all it's best to do it this way because you sample all the varying parameters evenly.  The scanline renderer samples shadows at a much higher rate that it does the image - but that's required due to very thing that makes scanline do fast - the regularly spaced image samples.

So you will not be able to exactly match scanline images with ray traced for this an a dozen other reasons.

You're right.  There is no near and far Z with ray tracing.  There is no need for it becuase thereisn't a perspective projection, so no divide and all of it's related precision problems.  Everything is done in world coordinates.