CompuServe Messages

Tim, reading the discussion, I feel that if any other software offers built-in blurring of cubic environment mapping, it will suffer from the same problem you discuss, i.e. curved surfaces will show a wider view of the environment map, where the blur will look proportionately less pronounced. My personal take on things would be to cast multiple rays from the surface, similar to the supersampling done when naively anti-aliasing a ray-traced image. Instead of projecting one reflected ray off the surface, following the normal at that point, simply project 2×2, 3×3… rays in a "square cone" with the cone's main axis being the normal. (how many reflection rays to compute, and the cone angle, would make perfect user parameters) You'd then average the reflected color from all the rays. Hmmm. I think this would still look sharper around rounded surfaces. By the way, Mike, my vote would be for you guys to work on soft shadows before even attempting to solve this problem. Currently, Tim and others have found a workaround, while the workaround for soft shadows (replace lights with n x n x n arrays of lights) is really not reasonable. I agree with others that the lack of shadows is one major difference between the look of our Imagine work and that produced by users of other software. (Not a gripe! Not a gripe! Just a user suggestion regarding priorities) Blaq!