CompuServe Messages

Daniel, The only people who have copies of the "Mirage Raytracing Engine" are myself, my development team, 2 beta test sites( 1 Us + 1 German) and anyone who has managed to come by a copy illegally..of which I hope there are none! <g>. "MRE" is still in BETA and everyone involved with the project has had explicit instrucions to forward all inquiries to myself. With that being said I will give you the latest details… 1. MRE currently imports a complete .3ds file for rendering. All texture data is seamlessly imported as well as cameras, lights, positions of all entities etc. 2. The final phases should be worked out by the end of this coming week. 3. Raytracing objects (which BTW, is selective by object) will be accomplished by simply creating a duplicate material of any existing material with a file extension of "_xxx" where xxx is the index of refraction for that object. For example the material "glass" would be copied, with all of its current settings to a file called "glass_166". This new material would now be applied to an object in a scene. When rendered with MRE this particular item in the scene would be raytraced! The pros and cons of this raytracer are the same as with all raytracers….rendering time per image will increase by at least a fair amount and most probably a great deal for complex scenes. People in this forum who have raytraced in the past will probably feel I am understating this, as a raytraced scene can take hours or even days. The pros are that for every extra minute the 'tracer is taking, it is usually doing some magnificent work on your scene. Photorealism is truly possible with raytracing! If ther are any other questions please ask!! TP