Merry Christmas!

Hi,

Merry Christmas to all of you! Have some peaceful days and ... don't spend them in front of your computer! I wanted to deliver a small present to the betatesters, but as always things take longer as expected. But after the new filtering here's another sneak peak at a new feature that will definitely take this thing a step further to production readiness. A viewport preview mesh! I tried to reuse the blobmesh code from the maxsdk, but it just didn't fit into my requirements. So I had to take the hard way and wrote a "marching cubes" routine from scratch. First tests turned out well. It's very buggy at the moment and not very fast either, but it does the job. Finally you can place objects accurately to the surface. You can even collapse it to an editable mesh and do whatever you want.

I still have a lot of bugs to fix until I can send it out, but I think it will work at the end.

Best regards,
Dieter

new reconstruction filter

Hi,

the good ranking my CGSphere image got is a perfect motivation:) I worked a bit further on the VRayIso surfaces. I added a new reconstruction filter. The old version just had a trilinear filter. This is the fastest option, but showed shading discontinuities if you had no Map applied or a map with low frequency noise. I added a BSpline reconstruction filter. I thought this might be a good choice regarding quality and speed. Here's a paper that compares different reconstruction filters. The BSpline filter now generates a much smoother mesh with smooth shading. Of course this costs a lot of speed. Therefore I still recommend the linear filter if you use high frequency noise, because it wouldn't make a difference then. I rendered a small image to show the difference. The cellsize and stepsize settings are the same in both surfaces. Only difference is the reconstruction filter used.
I will do some more tests before I upload it for the betatesters.

My email adress should be visible in my profile now, so if anybody wants to join, just drop me a mail.

Best regards,
Dieter