YA reflective sphere on a checkered plane.. at least, that was the
original idea. It quickly morphed into some kind of radiosity pic before
eventually becoming this. (Post-processing was done in Photoshop to
brighten up the pic.)

My intent was to make this an early morning scene. Unfortunately, while
the sky works well for this, the lighting itself seems strongly
reminiscent of late afternoon! (At least, to me and a lot of other
people who've seen it.) I have no idea how to fix this; quick tests in
Photoshop to add brighter/dimmer/cooler light only made the lighting
look strange. I suppose I should be happy that the lighting is
convincing enough to suggest *any* particular time of day, but I would
be happier with the one that I was aiming for. ;)

A couple notes on radiosity settings: first, the only light_source is a
"sun" placed well outside the room, and the count for this image was
only 100. I achieved this level of smoothness with a high error_bound
and a low low_error_factor (1 and .1, respectively). More testing is
needed to determine if this method can replace typical low error_bound
radiosity settings in other situations, unless someone's already done
some and I missed it, but I'll let someone with a faster computer than
mine do that testing! Second, judging from the color bleed on the floor,
it appears that radiosity "bounces" off of reflective surfaces; is this
true? Third, you can see the back of the room is full of artifacts; I
don't know if this is because of poor lighting, or because the radiosity
data in the reflected image is only a crude approximation.

I'll probably keep working on this; it would make a pretty cool scene
with window glass, blinds, pictures on the walls, maybe a ceiling fan,
and gods know what (a table, maybe?) in the middle, even if most of it
would only be visible in the reflection. Okay, I'll shut up and let you
see the pic now.. comments welcome as usual.

-Xplo

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