nemesis <nam### [at] nospamgmailcom> wrote:
> >   I'd say that rather than drop the algorithm, what's needed is a complete
> > rewrite. Read the original paper by Greg Ward, and study how Radiance did
> > it correctly and what POV-Ray is doing incorrectly, and fix the problems.

> Why stick with old ideas when new and exciting ideas building on 
> previous failures appear to be successful?

  Because the new ideas usually only work for polygonized scenes or, in
the case of unbiased rendering, are much slower (although may result in
better-looking images).

  Unless I understood incorrectly, the "lightcuts" algorithm is not about
global illumination, but about speeding up illumination from hundreds of
thousands of point light sources, which is a rather different thing. (Global
illumination is about light reflecting from surfaces and illuminating other
surfaces, in turn reflecting from them and illuminating yet other surfaces,
and so on. "Lightcuts" looked like an algorithm for direct illumination only.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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