Hi Neil,
> I can imagine it's far too slow for practical use.
This may be true for animations but for stills, slow render times are
often
not an issue.
That's true to a certain extent. But it can be quite annoying when you
have
to make test renders and you have to wait several minutes each time, even
for small pictures.
Arjo.
I forgot to mention that the 'ConcretecracksSDS' project I uploaded also
contains a modified ambient occlusion shader 'AOaa2' that slows it down even
more. Make this RT-invisible or delete it to get a fair impression of the
crackedconcrete shader!
Slow shaders may not be really problematic - until you combine them with
other slow methods like AO, GI or displacements... things are being
multiplied.
About this half-baked AOaa2 shader: it contains a few lines extra inside the
ao=Raytracer(...) line.
The idea was to make Raycount also depend on the Antialiasing channel:
tmp=divide(Signal, Antialiasing)
Raycount *= Linear(tmp)
In other words, boost Raycount in noisy areas where it's needed. I don't
even know if it's a valid idea, but it seems to make the noise a bit softer.
Maybe worth investigating a bit more... unfortunately I have a few weeks of
heavy modeling ahead, no time for fancy stuff :(
-Mark
