CompuServe Messages

Charles, >>my technique would take longer as the user increases the blurriness.<< This doesn't sound so good. Surely there's a technique to blur *traced* reflections that takes less time to render when it's very blurry, and more time when it's sharp. Eh? >>It might be interesting to debate whether it would take longer to calculate several surface para-normals per point, or to simply pre-blur the environment map.<< By posing this question, I assume you are referring to my remark to David… that using a Scanline renderer to generate environment maps for every object in a scene (to simulate radiosity) could potentially chew up more memory and time than simply faking radiosity in *Trace* mode. For this, and other reason I've already laid out, I'd prefer to have reflections blurred in Trace mode, where both the environment *and other objects* can be handled at once, automatically… and without any fancy image processing. Unless Impulse has already made significant headway (that we don't know about) in developing Imagine's image processing capabilities, I think it might be easier and faster for them to program the blurring into Trace mode. -Tim