Re: [grt-talk] Some suggestions.

[Simon Adameit]

Nikodemus Siivola wrote:
> Yes, phong is a trick, controlled by two parameters. And yes, these are
> traditionally *called* roughness and reflectivity, which really makes no
> sense: a rough surface is not going to be reflective. It all comes down to
> phong being a trick.

roughness makes sense as rougher surfaces will blur the reflection of 
the light-source more and thus create dull highlights. non rough 
surfaces wouldn't blur the reflection at all and no highlights would be 
visible.

> Area lights are a must. Eventually. But they are also computationally
> expensive: in some cases it's quite beneficial to be able to just simulate
> them with cheap tricks: for previews, and for images that would take too
> long to render otherwise.

In my experience (POV-Ray) adaptive area lights seem to be quite fast 
but a faster alternative would of course be nice.
> Of course, classic phong model can / will be incorporated as well. And it
> may be that this quest to empower the point-light's is misguided and doomed
> to fail. I've resolved to try, however. ,)=
>
> Smart phong would seem to have an advantage over the classic one: with
> classic phong you have identical higlights for all lights. With smart phong
> they can vary with distance and virtual size with no extra computational
> expense. I'm hoping that this might prove to be a case of "any detail is
> better than no detail".

I think the planned shader architecture will make it possible for the 
user to implement whatever he likes, cheap tricks, less cheap tricks and 
stochastic methods and perhaps even area-lights. So imo we should 
concentrate on this ;-)