nemesis wrote:
> you're using photon mapping for the caustics, right?  Ever since these
> guys have been posting these bruteforce renders, I've been noticing an
> interesting pattern about photon mapping:  the caustics don't match the
> shape of the source of light, you look at your render and to that of
> Severi and you notice your caustics are focused in one point while his
> are large and in the shape of the light sphere.  And that is to be
> expected, since photon mapping reacts to the (point)light source, not to
> a physical object emitting light, like in the bruteforce methods.
> 
> But radiosity works ok for that purpose. 

But radiosity doesn't work very well for shadows. AFAIK it is not that
easy to get sharp shadows with radiosity, where needed. As we saw in the
thread "Motecarlo path tracing with MegaPov 1.2.1". So you still have to
combine the usage of conventional light sources and emitting
shapes+radiosity.

So basically the user has to constantly make decisions like: "Do I want
semi-accurate shadows (only from certain light-source shapes, though),
or do I want semi-accurate caustics with radiosity artifacts? Or should
I try to use both to get decent results?"

Post a reply to this message