Nieminen Juha <war### [at] punarastascstutfi> wrote ...
> Ben Birdsey <cla### [at] netscapenet> wrote:
> : 2) Talk to Nathan really nicely and see if he would
> :    rewrite the radiosity code to use a kD tree and
> :    photon map.  Now that would be cool!
>
>   I think that Nathan has already tried using photon mapping for
radiosity.
> AFAIK it's a pretty inefficient way of doing it (most photons will be shot
> and stored although their contribution to the lighting is almost none).
> The stochastic method is much more efficient (at least in the way Nathan
> has made it).

Warp speaks the truth.  The KD tree is not good for radiosity, since you
cannot add new nodes to the kd-tree.  Plus, there aren't usually too many
nodes in the radiosity octree, so searching it is farily fast.

Directly visualizing a photon map as a solution for indirect diffuse
lighting generally produces very splotchy results and takes much longer than
the current method.  However, it should be possible to use data from a
"global photon map" to achieve good results in a radiosity scene (using the
current method) while using fewer samples.  I have tried this with not much
success, but I'll probably try it again now that I've made a few of my bug
fixes in POV's radiosity code.

-Nathan

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