Comment by amelius
1 day ago
Is the material description part of the language the same as in PBRT?
I'm asking because I had a lot of trouble trying to describe interfaces between materials, only to find out that what I wanted to do was not possible in PBRT without modifying the code. Apparently, in PBRT a material can only have one other material touching it. So, for example rendering a glass filled with water and ice is not possible without hacks. From a user's point of view this is a bit of a let-down, of course.
Nope, we made a complete high level Julia interface and I plan to have the Makie API be the main user facing scene description, which can be more descriptive than pbrt I think!
Ok. Did you see this:
https://blog.yiningkarlli.com/2019/05/nested-dielectrics.htm...
And I'm curious how you solve it.
Sorry, I was on my phone. This doesn't seem to be a problem of the description language, but rather how the integrator and materials work internally, so this works the same way in Julia currently. I do think though, that its more approachable to add experimental features like this in the Julia version. Would certainly be an interesting project! I do want to over time get further away from the pbrt-v4 architecture and get to something much more modular and easy to extend. I feel like the overlaps resolve should happen at scene creation time, to not have an expensive priority stack at raytracing time - then it would be just a matter of better tracking the media at boundary crossing. But haven't really thought this through of course ;)
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