Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
>   In that case it would be interesting to know why it seems that Radiance
> gets superb-looking, accurate and smooth radiosity with (apparently) no or
> minimal tweaking, while in POV-Ray it seems to be a constant struggle to
> get artifact-free radiosity which looks good and realistic.

- Does Radiance actually use the "Ward algorithm" to achieve "radiosity"?

- How does the speed of Radiance compare to POV? If you invest enough computing
power, you don't have to do much tweaking either to get superb-looking,
accurate and smooth results.

I have no experience with Radiance whatsoever, so I can't make any statements
about this.

>   I have the impression that Radiance does something which POV-Ray doesn't
> (or the other way around).

Well, I already found some things that POV does differently from Ward et al.; no
really dramatic changes so far - just a few screws to tweak the algorithm. But
they're not exposed to the user, and they're possibly not well-chosen.

From those settings, I guess POV should perform well with scenes that have an
overall reflectivity (specular + diffuse) of 0.25 or below - which is probably
not realistic...

> It could
> be conceivably be implemented in POV-Ray, assuming it's limited to work with
> meshes only (for both the illuminated surfaces and surfaces which illuminate
> other surfaces). Given how widely used meshes are, it wouldn't be all that
> far-fetched to think that it could be useful even with this limitation.

Given how many people use isosurfaces or blobs...: No deal.

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