Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
> One possibility would be to rewrite the whole radiosity code from scratch.
> Read the original paper by Greg Ward about the subject, and if possible,
> study how Radiance does it "properly", and learn from that before the
> rewrite.

Heh! I want it to be in the beta *soon*...!

When I look at the code, I'm indeed tempted to do a complete rewrite - too many
tiny little screws tweaked for unexplained reasons; but I'm not sure whether
that is desired by the POV team at all, despite the old warning that "The
design and implementation of [radiosity] is LIKELY to change in future versions
of POV-Ray" (emphasis added).

Oh, speaking of "the original paper", here's a quote from the sources:


"(This does not work the way that most radiosity programs do, but it
accomplishes the diffuse interreflection integral the hard way and produces
similar results. It is CALLED RADIOSITY here TO AVOID CONFUSION WITH AMBIENT
AND DIFFUSE, which already have well established meanings within POV).

INSPIRED by the paper "A Ray Tracing Solution for Diffuse Interreflection" by
Ward, Rubinstein, and Clear, in Siggraph '88 proceedings."

(again, emphasis added)


So it was never actually intended to be true radiosity, but just a thing that
did something similar. Therefore when refering to "the original paper" we
shouldn't be talking about a *re-write* but a completely new feature...

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