Development Journal of a Raytracer

Continuing with the channel material is not as easy as I had thought. The problem to finished the preprocessing step is, that the output operator had the wrong pin-type. For some reasons the shaders need to output quite some data so I can use it in the raytracer. So I had to add a new pin type to represent that. And now I first need to implement a component turning color into shader output. I could obviously just leave it at the color pin I use now, but honestly I would not like to write much code I will very soon have to throw away.

So I decided, that I will add an adapter to the list of operators which will use the shader models I have for my other material class and make it usable for the Channel Shaders. I always intended to add that so I can at least use some of the code I have written for my older, simpler system.

When I tried to use the result of the Edge Loop-modifier I found out, that something didn't work correctly. I obviously didn't get the correct length of the edge. When I today looked into it I found out, that the Change Geometry had a bug, when an edge was split multiple times it didn't correctly record that in a map. So I fixed that, although I already knew at that point, that it won't be the correct solution. But it is a very important class and so fixing problems with it is also very important.

In the meantime I have found an easy way to get the length of an edge. I could destroy it if I made a change in the future, so tomorrow I will add a comment to explain that. But I am still not finished, there is one more problem. I can't see, where the edge starts, so if I want to split an edge close to the middle, I can't tell if I use the right length. I think I will add a small helper tomorrow which shows a texture with "+" and "-" so I can immediately tell, which direction is which.