news:web.49553f5eb480f7928ac4fcf10@news.povray.org...

> From what I gather from Ward's paper, true radiosity requires the geometry 
> to be
> subdivided in - roughly - equally sized patches. This is easy to do with 
> mesh
> based geometry, but infeasible with the mathematical representation 
> POV-ray
> uses for objects.

Now here's something that has been bothering me for a while. The current 
generation of commercial renderers (the Vray/finalRender types, not the 
unbiaised types like Maxwell or FryRender) are, as far as I know, evolutions 
of POV-Ray-like renderers, i.e. basically raytracers with GI on top. 
However, they are extremely fast and are able to produce artifact-free GI 
images, typically for design and architectural visualisations where light 
calculations must be very accurate, even for complex models. One can throw a 
lot at them (area lights of any shape, blurred reflection/refraction, real 
focal blur, displacement mapping etc.) and they still perform very well, and 
users obtain fast and smooth results. Of course, these renderers are all 
mesh-based.
The question is: is using mesh geometry the only way to get this kind of 
speed, and is POV-Ray's unique ability to deal with mathematical 
representations a limitation here?

G.

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