clipka <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:
> Am 02.12.2010 13:17, schrieb Stephen Klebs:
>
> > This makes the point very clearly. But in the particular example of the
> > gradients that for me set this off was that I was trying to deal with a
> > completely graphics issue: rgb 0.5 ambient 1. There is no light involved here.
> > Ambient is not a real property, it is a completely artificial adjustment control
> > that does not exist in the real world. Some of us are not always dealing
> > necessarily with how much light is reflected off a piece of white paper in the
> > real world. We just want to make a picture by telling POV give me rgb 128.
>
> There /is/ an equivalent to "ambient" in the real world: Ambient light.
> Of course in real life it is not as uniform as in POV-Ray, but that's
> because the "ambient" mechanism was designed at a time where it was
> prohibitively time-consuming to compute ambient light from the scene
> geometry and materials (a process we call radiosity now), so the next
> best thing to do was to let the user decide how much ambient
> illumination looked convincing.
>
> The fact that the ambient mechanism can also be used to create "non-3D
> scenes" like your gradients is just a side effect of it. It's not what
> it was originally designed for.
>
> So yes, there /is/ light involved there. In the POV-Ray render engine,
> there is /nothing/ without light.

Isn't ambient light still light? Like photons somewhere. Last time I checked
when I turned off the switch, I couldn't see anything.

Was ambient created out of convenience or out of necessity? You seem to imagine
that if we can get all our equations right for accurately describing the
behavior of light in the physical world, that somehow we will get the perfect
picture. Umph?

And what you call a "side effect". There are many ways of creating 3-D graphics.
Is POV now only for photo-realists? Csn't us fractalized unrealists play with it
too?

Post a reply to this message