Nekar Xenos <j-p### [at] citywalkcoza> wrote:
: A friend of mine is all excited about Flamingo that he says does radiosity
: faster and better than Pov.

  The global lighting code of POV-Ray has still way to go, as it still has
some unknown problems (bugs?). AFAIK POV-Ray 3.5 will have basically the same
radiosity code as MegaPov has.
  In many scenes it works like a charm, very fast and the result is excellent.
However, it's quite usual that you just don't get it working in your
specific scene (either it's too dim or too bright or has annoying artifacts,
specially near corners; it also has this annoying tendency of working in
the way that if you set low quality you get good but unrealistic illumination
(eg. no darkening in corners) and if you set high quality you get better
illumination but annoying artifacts in corners). These problems might be
caused by wrong or buggy code. Perhaps a total rewrite could be necessary
in order to get rid of the problems (it seems that currently no-one knows
where the problems are in the radiosity code)?
  Anyways, the problem with POV-Ray radiosity is that it works in some
scenes but in others it has lots of problems. Other programs usually have
a working and bugless radiosity code and it usually works quite well in
all scenes.

  I'm not completely sure about this, but as far as I know, Radiance uses
a very similar montecarlo raytracing technique as POV-Ray uses in order
to calculate the radiosity, and the quality of Radiance images is quite
well known. Also, if I'm not completely wrong, the radiosity algorithm
of both programs are based on a paper of the same author (Greg Ward).
So the algorithm itself works well (as we can see from Radiance). It's just
the implementation in POV-Ray that has some problems.

-- 
#macro N(D,I)#if(I<6)cylinder{M()#local D[I]=div(D[I],104);M().5,2pigment{
rgb M()}}N(D,(D[I]>99?I:I+1))#end#end#macro M()<mod(D[I],13)-6,mod(div(D[I
],13),8)-3,10>#end blob{N(array[6]{11117333955,
7382340,3358,3900569407,970,4254934330},0)}//                     - Warp -

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