> Was ambient created out of convenience or out of necessity?

It was needed to avoid shadowed parts of a 3D scene being completely black 
(which is not realistic in many real life situations).  When it was created 
hardware was not fast enough to do any more complex GI calculations, so 
adding a simple ambient term to every pixel gave a good improvement with 
little performance trade-off.

> You seem to imagine
> that if we can get all our equations right for accurately describing the
> behavior of light in the physical world, that somehow we will get the 
> perfect
> picture. Umph?

Yes, it should be perfectly identical to if you'd set up the identical scene 
in real life and taken a photo with a perfect camera.  This is the goal of 
POV.

> And what you call a "side effect". There are many ways of creating 3-D 
> graphics.
> Is POV now only for photo-realists? Csn't us fractalized unrealists play 
> with it
> too?

Sure, but don't expect the POV developers to sacrifice the core performance 
(on rendering realistically lit 3D scenes) to make it easier for various 
"side effect" to work easier.

Post a reply to this message