Question for BB: from what I've read earlier, you were planning to add more texture types to LuxRender in order to have a complete node-based shading system a la Poser. But if you create your textures procedurally, anyway, is it really a good idea to do it via a whole bunch of separate texture objects?

Wouldn't it be more useful to instead just add one new texture type "procedural", which would define its own shading language a la matmatic? Internally, it may make sense to represent elements of the shading scripts as nodes, so you can do all kinds of optimizations on the generated shader. You might even get ambitious and provide a graphical interface for creating node-based shaders as in Python. But I see no strong reason why all of these nodes would have to be proper LuxRender "textures". If you use your own internal node type, you can happily deal with negative and very large values, and you just clip them to the range that Lux is comfortable with at the very end.

Just a thought.

-- I'm not mad at you, just Westphalian.