"Cousin Ricky" <ric### [at] yahoocom> wrote:

>
> It appears to take nearly 3 times as long to reuse the data than to compute it
> in the first place!  This more than defeats the purpose of 2-pass radiosity.

Yes, this is an irritating situation. The entire save rad/load rad idea probably
deserves an in-depth discussion. It's interesting that, AFAIK, saved PHOTON data
*completely* overrides its settings (and loads very quickly), which is what the
concept of saving/loading is supposed to be. My own experiments bear this out.
Whereas saved rad data still uses *some* settings--and unless they are tweaked,
the 2nd pass takes just as long (or longer.)

I'm still trying to understand how some of the aforementioned rad tweaks came
about. (From time to time, I've run across them is others' scene files as
well.) They kind of seem like 'folk wisdom'. For example, using pretrace_start
1 and pretrace_end 1.

It would be quite useful to many of us if the reasons behind these tweaks could
be explained. Perhaps they have been, somewhere, but I've had no luck in
tracking them down. It sure would save each of us lots of duplicated
experimentation/testing time. (Not that experiments are a waste of time, of
course; but loading rad data seems like a black art!)

Ken W.

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