clipka wrote:
> marky.addison schrieb:
> 
>> I am trying to figure out what mathematics does POV-Ray use.
>> Does it use more Raytracing or Radiosity or it combines both?
> 
> Normally it uses raytracing, unless you explicitly tell it to also 
> include radiosity (note that the term may be ambiguous; a more fitting 
> term would have been "ambient illumination", but that term was already 
> occupied in POV-Ray for a quite cheap approximation thereof).
> 
>> How does it make shadows (isn't it with radiosity)?
> 
> No, ambient illumination kicks in regardless of whether a surface is 
> exposed to direct light or not (although its effect is most obvious in 
> shadows).
> 
>> So I need some formulas, integrals and derivatives so I can
>> better understand how it works.
> 
> If you want to know how it /works/, you should ask for algorithms. I 
> guess what you want to know is what these algorithms /represent/ in 
> mathematical terms.

The answer probably should be that anybody who wants to know how ray-tracing 
works should take a good look at the available literature. And that really 
is not hard to find thanks to the documentation:
<http://www.povray.org/documentation/view/3.6.1/211/>

Plus Andrew Glassner's Principles of Digital Image Synthesis, 
Morgan-Kaufmann Publishers, San Francisco, 1995, which has a lot of formulas 
inside and is way more theoretical than useful :-)

	Thorsten

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