[Mihai]

Since Maxwell stores the computed spectral energy in the mxi file (I guess for every pixel?), I wonder if it wouldn't be possible to memorize how the light travelled from the lightsource through the scene, influencing the spectral energy in the different materials and finally storing the final state of the pixel.

Imagine, if this were possible then if we were to change say the color of a material, all the rays that interacted with that material and their resulting influence on other objects after having bounced off that material could be instantly updated...

What I mean is, imagine you have a Cornel box with freshly painted red, green and blue walls and you throw a ball with different colored spots on it into this room and you have to wait until it has finished randomly bouncing around in that room, at each bounce giving away some of it's color and receiving some color from the wall. Now, if you have already calculated the trajectory, imagine if you could change the color of one of those spots on the ball, and the ball had a memory which knew exactly where that spot touched a wall, then the color changes could be instantenous.....

Although....working in spectral space changing a color would mean you change the energy which means the final trajectory would be different...

[RonB]

Well Mihai, that is an interesting thought. The image would still have to be rerendered though one way or another, and to do that say on a 8 bit level it would have to have some sort of layering like capacity...or tonal select based much like Photoshop on a 256 greyscale level, affecting pixels in a radius from the color change. If that makes sense...interesting concept for sure.

After thinking about it again, never mind the above, I misunderstood your post...

I believe there is a suite of Photoshop image editing plugins that normally used for spectral anyalsis and research that can do what you are suggesting as a post render editing process. It's not intended for it but one of the side benefits are some very interesting color selection and image enhancement tools. I think it's called Fovea Pro and made by Raindeer Graphics...

Ron

[Maximus3D]

Nice idea Mihai, but i think this one would work better for a interactive realtime editable preview window where you don't need that exact 100% accurate represenatation of what the final result will look like. Then you could in that preview window adjust the colors of objects and such things and then it changes those in your rendering on the fly. That'd be pretty cool!

And then only ofcourse recalculate those pixels who are changed and different, there's no need to recalculate the whole scene if not everything has changed that much so it's necessary. It shouldn't be totally impossible to do even tho it requires quite alot of extra programming to make it real, but it's not impossible.

It was a very interesting idea you had Mihai.. you should work more on that one.

/ Max

[andronikos916]

It is not exactly what are you mentioning here Mihai but as far as I know nad unoficially speaking: Light Analysis tool is under development.

Sorry, can not share any info guys on when, how etc.

cy,
Andronikos