Feature suggestion: Refinement mode/threshold

[Zoot]

While I appreciate the concept of an un-biased render, in reality a lot of the time, when dealing with a lot of reflection/refraction, etc., you end up with a lot of "sparkly bits" after a few 1,000 samples.

I would ask whether it might make sense to have a sort of adaptive anti-aliasing mode where, after some initial number of samples, the renderer would switch to only sampling pixels which have high contrast relative to adjacent pixels.

So for example I might render for 10K samples across the whole image, then at that point the renderer would concentrate only on pixels with high adjacency contrast for, say, another 5K samples each.

This might give significantly better results than simply continuing to sample the entire image where most of the image is not going to increase substantially in quality, and the effort would be better spent in specific high-contrast areas.

So either two sample limits, one initial one and one refinement one, or an over-all anti-aliasing mode where further sample refinement is automatically concentrated on areas with high pixel-to-pixel contrast.

Thoughts?

Z.

[radiance]

this is what we are trying to achieve with MLT in the next beta 2.3 update...

Radiance

[vinz]

very interesting, it would be extremely powerfull

[Zoot]

Cool, I look forward to playing with 2.3 then!

Z.