Thorsten Froehlich wrote:
> 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

Physically Based Rendering by Pharr and Humphreys is the other standard
book I have seen mentioned. As recommended reading for ray-tracing, not
specifically in regards to how POV-Ray works.

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