47bd6ea9$1@news.povray.org...

> I can certainly see the advantage of a "I just throw objects in and it 
> works" approach to lighting. But then, that's more or less how POV-Ray's 
> radiosity feature works. You usually don't have to twiddle the settings 
> all *that* much - it's more a question of how many years you're willing to 
> wait for the result.

Just wondering... Could you show us some of your own experiments with 
radiosity in POV-Ray or is your position just theoretical? Because after 
using (and being in love with) POV-Ray's radiosity since 1996 and hundreds 
of tests and pictures later, that's not really what I've experienced. Even 
when using insane settings, there are situations where you just can't get 
rid of artifacts and other problems and where workarounds (or Photoshop...) 
are necessary to hide them. Unbiased renderers do that naturally and 
traditional high-end renderers have lots of built-in optimisation tricks 
that POV-Ray just doesn't have.

> And that's the kind of worrying part - how many years will you have to 
> wait for the result from an unbiased renderer?

As I said it's now used *** for actual production *** of stills (mostly 
architectural, design and even TV commercials) so apparently that's not such 
a problem, at least for commercial production with access to networks of 
fast machines and render farms. But even on a "normal" hobbyist machine, my 
tests with Maxwell were rather positive, i.e. it was slow, but so was 
radiosity in 1996. My "glasses" picture that's in the "Digital art" article 
in Wikipedia took 500 hours to render. For POVers, speed isn't always an 
issue.

G.

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