ANN: 3Delight 4.5

[Aghiles]

Hello Everyone,

3Delight 4.5 is available. Here is a list of the most important
features and improvements in this release:

RenderMan
- 3Delight now fully implements the CSG RenderMan capability.
- Enhanced arbitrary output variables support: each output
variable can now have its own filter.
- The `zthreshold' option, useful for shadowmaps, is now
implemented.
- Improper displacement bounds are now reported as a warning.

Performance
- 3Delight's performance has been improved with better depth
culling and more efficient handling of depth-complex scenes.
- Atmosphere shaders can be evaluated more efficiently, this
leads to faster rendering of volumetric effects.

See http://www.3delight.com/ZDoc/3delight_19.html#IDX51

- Improved texture lookup speed and cache usage. This also has
a beneficial effect on network traffic.
- Some very complex implicit surfaces (made of thousands of
nodes) now render faster.
- Both scene loading and RIB output are about three times
faster.
- A new display variable, `__CPUTime', can be used to identify
shading bottlenecks.

Image Quality
- `calculatenormal()' now returns better normals and exhibits
more geometric detail in finely displaced geometry.
- Smooth derivatives are implemented and contribute to better
antialiasing of textures and procedural patterns.
- Improved DSM filtering, those should now be more coherent
with conventional shadow maps.
- Atmosphere shaders can now work correctly with layered
translucent surfaces.

Shader Baking
A new shadeop, `bake()', can now be used to easily bake shader
computed values into a `.bake' file. Additionally, `tdlmake'
can now read `.bake' files and convert them into a texture.

See http://www.3delight.com/ZDoc/3delight_40.html#SEC93

Shader Compiler
The optimizer has been further improved to generate smaller and
faster code, especially for very large or automatically
generated shaders. This can significantly improve rendering
times.

New Tools
- `ribshrink' is a tool to factor RIB archives out of a set of
RIB files. The purpose of this tool is to save storage space
and network traffic.

See http://www.3delight.com/ZDoc/3delight_16.html#SEC25

- `ribdepends' is a tool to list RIB dependencies such as
textures, shaders and archives, it can also be used to create
site independent RIB packages.

See http://www.3delight.com/ZDoc/3delight_17.html#SEC26

Linux builds
3Delight is now linked against `glibc' 2.3 so issues when
linking with other applications (such as liquid) should be
gone.