From PixieWiki

Are there features you'd like to see in Pixie - perhaps you're aware of something another renderer supports that Pixie currently doesn't. Add it here with a short explanation.

Contents 1 Layered shaders 2 Reverse perspective 3 commandline switches 4 Currently unsupported features 5 Exponential Color Mapping 6 Control Over Photon Bounces

[edit] Layered shaders

I think layered shaders will be useful. Every next shader layer must use values modified by previous shader. It can be made easy just by adding more ri calls like:

Surface1
Surface2
  ...
Surface5

Simple example:

AttributeBegin
  Surface1 "normalmap"
  Surface2 "occmap"
  AttributeBegin
    Surface "plastic"
    Sphere ...
  AttributeEnd
  AttributeBegin
    Surface "matte"
    Plane
  AttributeEnd
AttributeEnd

In this exampe we will get two arbitrary outputs: normal map and occlusion map

-- Note by henrymop: You could also have a setting which tells how much the surface affects the object, except for the first surface, because it doesn't have any surface underneath.

[edit] Reverse perspective

I wish to have way to make reverse perspective images. Easest way to do it is to put camera to the back of the scene and turn front face culling or just by scaling scene in screen coordinate system to -1 by Z-axis before aplying Perspective transformation or maybe just to have special hider like "reversestachostic".

Scale 1 1 -1
Projection "perspective" "fov" [37.849288832102467]
Transform [....]
WorldBegin
   ....
WorldEnd

I tryed this code both in pixie and aqsis. It doesn't work anywhere.

[edit] commandline switches

I would like these commandline switches:

rndr -v or -version or --version = prints version number and name

rndr -p or -progress or --progress = prints a progress status

rndr -beep = beep when all RIBs are rendered

rndr -beeps = beep after each rendered RIBs

rndr -D = has the same effect as -d but will automatically close 
          the framebuffer display driver when finished

rndr -f or -frames = only render a range of frames

rndr -t or -stats = prints the frame statistics

rndr -bake = baking illumination into texture maps

rndr -logo = prints the PIXIE logo on the frames...

[edit] Currently unsupported features

RiBlobbies surfaces

Support for the RiBlobby primative. It's possible that (at least when using the Ray-Tracing Hider) these could be implimented in terms of Pixie's Implicit primative

CSG primatives

Support for RiSolidBegin and so on.

Arbitrary Geometric Description

RiGeometricRepresentation

Arbitrary Deformations

RiDeformationV

Trim Curves

RiTrimCurve

Imager Shaders

RiImagerV

Traverse statement in SL

Support for adding your own transmission style trace

shadingnormal function

Trivial can be emulated with -faceforward(normalize(N),I) but would be nice

Support for __nondiffuse and __nonspecular

Message passing support from builtin shaders supporting PRMan and BMRT style messages. we already support the necessary message passing, __nondiffuse / __nonspecular support is TBD

Support for Baking Illumination

Support for recording or "baking" shading and lighting results into texture maps using -bake command-line and/or new statements. The baked texture maps can be used for accelerating software rendering or for real-time hardware rendering. Almost any feature can be baked: color, opacity, position, normal, tangents, programmable shading, indirect illumination, ray tracing, soft shadows, caustics, filtering and anti-aliasing etc. Bitmap can be recorded at 8-bit, 16-bit.

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Radiosity like POVRay would be wonderful. This would allow for object based lights.

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[edit] Exponential Color Mapping

Obviously the current color mapping(see: http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/VRayHelp150beta/examples_gbuffer.htm) is just linear. It's almost mandatory to have exponential color mapping functionality in such a powerfull renderer like Pixie.

Does exposure and gamma not do what you need?

[edit] Control Over Photon Bounces

Maybe It's a good idea to split the GPM into 2(primari and secondari photon hits map) or to split it to the number of bounces depth for better control onto the global illumination with a functionality to rize or reduce the particular "bounce maps" exposure. With this functionality it will be more flexible to simulate the exponential color mapping and even to edit the whole lightning for better results...