>> 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.

Well, maybe my scenes aren't complicated enough then. Usually if I just 
insert an empty radiosity{} block, I get a reasonable image. Sometimes I 
have to tweat a few parameters and then it looks good. Occasionally it 
just becomes so absurdly slow that I give up.

But then, as you know, most of my renders are pretty trivial. For 
example, the image attached to the first post in this thread. I have no 
idea how the hell it's possible to model something that complicated. 
Surely something like that must take many months of modelling?

>> 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.

Heh. Any algorithm can be made fast enough if you throw enough CPU power 
at it. ;-) [Er, well, any linear-time algorithm anyway...]

> 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.

OK, well that's encouraging then...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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