Am 23.07.2014 20:18, schrieb Nekar Xenos:

> What I would like to see with radiosity is a system that distinguishes
> between different materials. Smooth shiny materials should have a
> smaller cone of scattering than cement which should have a very wide
> angle of scattering.

Well... no, not really. In smooth shiny materials, the primary direction 
of the cone of scattering virtually always depends on the angle of the 
incoming light, approaching classic specular reflection as the object 
gets even smoother.

To model such cases, POV-Ray's radiosity approach is inherently 
unsuited, because the sample information needs to be very 
memory-efficient and thus quite limited - POV-Ray only stores a single 
weighted average of all the light coming in, so any information about 
the direction of the incoming light is lost entirely.

What really kicks ass for smooth shiny (but not perfectly polished) 
materials is blurred reflections; with a strong blur it can even give a 
subtle edge to comparatively dull materials


That doesn't mean your idea would be all nonsense though - see the stuff 
I happen to have just shown off in the "Brilliant Spheres" thread on 
povray.binary.images ;-)

(Actually it's not /that/ much of a coincidence: As a first approach at 
"replacing" radiosity I plan to actually just keep using it but not 
cache the results (plus make sure that the secondary rays shot are 
different each time); and as I want UberPOV to fully support non-default 
brilliance settings, I figured that I might just as well add that to 
POV-Ray's radiosity first... And then one thing led to another, and I 
found myself adding all those fancy finish improvements that had been on 
my agenda for so long...)

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