Warp wrote:
>   It's just trickery.

Details? :-)

-- 
William Tracy
afi### [at] gmailcom -- wtr### [at] calpolyedu

You know you've been raytracing too long when you find yourself trying
to hack your way into one of the Cray super computers convinced if you
can get in you could prove real-time raytracing was possible.
    -- Ken Tyler

Post a reply to this message

William Tracy wrote:
> Warp wrote:
>>   It's just trickery.
> 
> Details? :-)

  Emitting media.

Post a reply to this message

Just downloaded 3.7b24 to try it out ... is the effect
of area_light with area_illumination basically identical
to using a grid of normal light_sources, but still more
efficient due to adaptive sampling?

Post a reply to this message

Christian Froeschlin wrote:
> Just downloaded 3.7b24 to try it out ... is the effect
> of area_light with area_illumination basically identical
> to using a grid of normal light_sources, but still more
> efficient due to adaptive sampling?

  Yes, it should be basically the same as with a grid of point lights.
Speed comes from the fact that shadow tests are much faster than would
be with the point lights.

Post a reply to this message

Warp wrote:

>   Yes, it should be basically the same as with a grid of point lights.
> Speed comes from the fact that shadow tests are much faster than would
> be with the point lights.

Cool! Actually, it just occurred to me that the functionality
should be quite similar to tgq's lightdome macro. Both light dome
and area_light would seem to be special cases of some "grid_light"
supporting multiple grid shapes and individual light colors ;)

Post a reply to this message

Christian Froeschlin wrote:
> Just downloaded 3.7b24 to try it out ... is the effect
> of area_light with area_illumination basically identical
> to using a grid of normal light_sources, but still more
> efficient due to adaptive sampling?

  Btw, I suppose you didn't see my post about the subject
in the beta group. I posted links to an example:

  This is an image rendered with a regular old area_light (rendered with
"-w800 -h600 +a0.1 +am2"):

http://warp.povusers.org/images/arealighttest1.jpg

  It took 13 seconds to render in my computer.

  This is the same scene, but the area light has been replaced with the
equivalent grid of point lights:

http://warp.povusers.org/images/arealighttest2.jpg

  This took 1 min 51 seconds to render.

  This is, again, the area_light, but with the new full area lighting
feature turned on:

http://warp.povusers.org/images/arealighttest3.jpg

  This took 36 seconds to render.

Post a reply to this message

On Sat, 19 Jan 2008 19:39:38 +0100, Christian Froeschlin <chr### [at] chrfrde> wrote:

>Cool! Actually, it just occurred to me that the functionality
>should be quite similar to tgq's lightdome macro. Both light dome
>and area_light would seem to be special cases of some "grid_light"
>supporting multiple grid shapes and individual light colors ;)

That'd be cool functionality.  I second.

Post a reply to this message