In article <fn8p50ta2ivd6k65j01uk2a79jouffbrna@4ax.com>,
 Lutz Kretzschmar <lut### [at] stmuccom> wrote:

> > Something like this could be done in a pure raytracer, but I don't think 
> > it can be done with POV-Ray's radiosity, reflections and refractions ...
> I agree with that, it would probably be quite hard.

There is another raytracing algorithm that only follows single rays into 
the scene, randomly choosing between reflection or refraction when 
necessary. A single ray per pixel obviously won't give very good 
results, but the idea is to do multiple rays from within each pixel, 
doing antialiasing at the same time. This could just be left to run 
indefinitely. Radiosity could be done by a type of blurred reflection, 
and the first few passes could collect data to determine which parts 
would benefit most from more rays. In theory, this method concentrates 
most rays in the more "shallow" portions of the scene, the number of 
rays not exploding with increasing depth as it would if it followed 
every reflected or transmitted ray.

Photons would still have to be generated at the beginning, and rendering 
started over when more photons are shot. The same would go for POV-style 
radiosity, which would probably be far more efficient than the blurred 
reflection method.

-- 
Christopher James Huff <cja### [at] earthlinknet>
http://home.earthlink.net/~cjameshuff/
POV-Ray TAG: <chr### [at] tagpovrayorg>
http://tag.povray.org/

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