Lightwave3D has a feature where it smooths or blurs the radiosity artifacts,
and it seems to work fairly well. It would be great to see this in POV-Ray
as well. I have tried this in photoshop and it is much more pleasing to the
eye to see smoothed out inaccuracies rather than patchy ones. However this
really needs to be done inside of POV-Ray since doing it in photoshop for
all but the simplest scenes with no textures is impractical.

George Pantazopoulos

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First render with low error_bound, without aa:

  nearest_count 1
  error_bound 0.1
  save_file "rad"

Then with higher error_bound:

  pretrace_start 1
  pretrace_end 1
  nearest_count 1
  error_bound 0.4
  load_file "rad" always_sample off

This averages more samples from the first render. Setting
nearest_count higher didn't improve quality on the scenes
I have tested this. Just made it slower. The first render
doesn't need to be full resolution because the image isn't
used anyway. When reducing resolution maybe also reduce
minimum_reuse the same amount.

If the scene contains transparent objects this two phase
method also cuts down render time. Just set max_trace_level
to the minimum so that rays still pass through transparent
objects and use diffuse 0, ambient 0, no normal and no
reflection on those objects for the first render.


_____________
Kari Kivisalo

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Thanks for the advice Kari, I'll try that out !

George Pantazopoulos


"Kari Kivisalo" <pro### [at] luxlabcom> wrote in message
news:3CC591B8.E05F9DC7@luxlab.com...
>
> First render with low error_bound, without aa:
>
>   nearest_count 1
>   error_bound 0.1
>   save_file "rad"
>
> Then with higher error_bound:
>
>   pretrace_start 1
>   pretrace_end 1
>   nearest_count 1
>   error_bound 0.4
>   load_file "rad" always_sample off
>
> This averages more samples from the first render. Setting
> nearest_count higher didn't improve quality on the scenes
> I have tested this. Just made it slower. The first render
> doesn't need to be full resolution because the image isn't
> used anyway. When reducing resolution maybe also reduce
> minimum_reuse the same amount.
>
> If the scene contains transparent objects this two phase
> method also cuts down render time. Just set max_trace_level
> to the minimum so that rays still pass through transparent
> objects and use diffuse 0, ambient 0, no normal and no
> reflection on those objects for the first render.
>
>
> _____________
> Kari Kivisalo

Post a reply to this message