I see, what my mind was doing was thinking of it as a relative thing which a person
setting the objects and lights up would be adjusting for (like so many other
tweakings).
This makes more sense to me now as a kind of photon falloff with distance, that is to
say the farther a light the less photons counted (less dense). Or am I going off the
track there? Well, anyway, it's making more and more sense all the time.


Nathan Kopp wrote:
> 
> Not really.  The separation keyword allows you to specify the spacial
> separation of photons at the center of the target object.  Of course,
> photons are always spreading out (from the light source location) so the
> actual spacing is always increasing as the photon moves farther from the
> light source (unless it gets focused by a lens, of course).
> 
> I could have made the user specify an angular spacing (or a total number of
> photons, for that matter) instead of a spacial separation.  I chose
> spacial separation because it correlates directly with the size of the
> gather radius (which the user must also specify).  Thus, once you have
> the settings figured out for a scene, you can scale the separation
> values and gather radius by the same amount to increase/decrease the
> total number of photons.
> 
> As you move the light source closer and farther from the target object,
> the angular density of the photons will change, but the total number of
> photons will remain approximately the same.
> 
> -Nathan Kopp
> 
> Bob wrote:
> >
> > Think I'll stick to rendering only. No programming math for me, thankyou.
> > But back to the question about light source distance :) is it directly
proportional to
> > the "separation" then? In other words, the closer or farther away a light, a
narrower or
> > wider separation is needed to keep the same end result?
> >

-- 
 omniVERSE: beyond the universe
  http://members.aol.com/inversez/homepage.htm
 mailto://inversez@aol.com?Subject=PoV-News

Post a reply to this message