"Kenneth" <kdw### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
>
> It would indeed be useful to optimize the final saved data file, if possible...
>
> Unfortunately, not a single line of [the saved data] data seems to repeat;
> I tried hard to find at least one repetition, with no luck...
> I haven't yet tried a test where the camera is static; maybe there *would*
> be duplicate entries that could be eliminated.
>

In all my animation/radiosity tests so far, I've used a moving CAMERA (and no
moving scene objects) to create the composite rad-data file. That seemed a
logical way to proceed; but I just did a 'static' camera test-- which produced
some interesting results:

Saving/appending 3 identical radiosity renders, with identical rad settings,
seems to be enough to prevent any 'new' rad light patches from being created
when running the final animation (assuming pretrace_start and pretrace_end are
changed to 1.0 for the final run; and assuming that the camera remains static.)
I would call it a '3-pass' technique. There are still a *few* stray patches
created, but they are very hard to spot. Of course, this doesn't take into
account any moving OBJECTS in the scene; I haven't gotten that far yet ;-)

As for the data file itself and its possible duplicated entries: I decided to
render and save a *tiny* radiosity file-- 4X3 pixels(!)-- made with a static
camera, and using the 3-pass trick. The final saved file is a 'composite' of the
3 renders and their data. The first 'pass' produced 108 saved data lines; the
2nd added only 9 lines; the third, 9 more. Then I tried to find duplicated data
lines among the total, but again no luck. So it *seems* that POV-ray
automatically removes any redundant data from an appended radiosity file.

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