"Zeger Knaepen" <zeg### [at] povplacecom> wrote:
> how about making the default value for emission the same as the
> ambient-value?

No, definitely not. In a radiosity scene, only very, very few textures are
typically intended to emit light. But in a non-radiosity scene, you probably
want many, many textures to have an ambient term, in order to approximate
"ambient illumination" (i.e. illumination by light scattered diffusely from
other objects).

So the typical use case would be to have ambient X emission 0.


> Also, I don't think emission should have any meaning when not used with
> radiosity.

I disagree.

In a radiosity-only scene, of course you want emission to have an effect,
because there'd be no other way to get light into the scene (except for a sky
sphere).

When lighting the same scene classically, you probably want the same thing to
look similar when directly visible in the scene. For this, it will have to
emit, too.


Christian's idea to leave ambient fully functional in radiosity scenes for
compatibility, and expecting the user to actively turn it off by setting
ambient_light to 0, seems the most viable solution to me.

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