ice-boy:

Everything I do is faster than anybody else's implementation. :)

I'm impressed that you notice the subtle stuff I do - always. You're the only one who really got excited about gamma correction in shaders, and realized you could do it yourself all over the place.

My new shadow catcher has the same behavior. Poser has a built-in shadow catcher. I am making a new one in shaders, which should be slower. Mine does 10 times more stuff, renders better, and has lots of control parameters. But mine is faster than the built-in one.

I work on these tools for days, weeks, even months. The EnvSphere and its shaders took me about 150 hours. I did over 400 test renders. The GenIBL tool took months of research, experimenting, and testing. I went down so many wrong paths on that one. Then one day, while I was on my usual 2 hour drive to one of my clients, I was thinking about how refraction works, and I worked out how to do the perspective correcting lens in my head. I was so excited, I coded it up as soon as I got out of the car. I was so surprised it worked. Who would have thought that setting the index of refraction to 1,000,000 would have any practical use? Still, after that I fine tuned the number of polygons in the probe for hours, trying to find the minimum that produced accurate reflections, so it would be fast.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)