I hope I'm not in the wrong group when asking
the following question here, if I am, please forget
that you know me. :-)

How does POV-Ray's Radiosity method work?
I've tried searching the web for a document covering
the actual function and approach, but was unable
to find something useful.

Anyways, as far as I've understood the docs, its
like this:
1. Pretrace-Level:
Divide scene into patches, calculate ambient light-values
for those, gathering diffuse-reflected light by shooting
rays (amount given by "count") outward.

For each successive step, we'll check if neighbouring
patches are too different in brightness, and subdivide
them. If we use a recursion_limit, we'll do another
"bounce" of light outward, though I'm unsure if that
happens in a new pretrace-step, or is done right at the
beginning, and further pretrace-steps just do the
subdivision.

That's just about how far I was able to understand
it, but I'd like to know it in detail. For example, if
someone could point me on a document describing
the technique, and provide some information on what
POV-Ray has used and what was modified...

The main thing I'm actually trying to do with this question
is gather information on what different pretrace-steps do,
if and which some calculations are done iterative (and thus
the need for several pretrace-passes), etc. I'd like to really
fully understand the individual options for radiosity, cause for
some I've just got the feeling like:
use lower values for more detail (regarding pretrace),
use higher values for more accuracy (regarding count),
etc.

Regards,
Tim


-- 
Tim Nikias v2.0
Homepage: http://www.digitaltwilight.de/no_lights



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