On Tue, 01 Dec 1998 13:30:08 +0200, Margus Ramst <mar### [at] peakeduee>
wrote:

>Both (true) radiosity and photon mapping should be applicable to a
>raytracing engine. I am not sure if they can be applied to POV without
>fundamental changes; I believe both would require some kind of surface
>meshing.

Photon mapping doesn't require any meshing.  Whether it can be
smoothly added to POV is another question, but one which I hope to
find an answer to once I get the superpatch where I want it.

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>  Actually they are not rays, but waves.

Are you so sure? Most physics scientists aren't... They
agree that light sure behaves like a wave, but it also
behaves like a particle.

>  This may start a physics flame war, but a photon is not a
particle but
>a electromagnetic wave quantum (is that the right term? I
have studied
>physics only in finnish... :) ).

Well, yes , an "electromagnetic wave quantum" seems the best
way to visualise
(visualize ;) ) it. I guess the Finnish get the same physics
at school as in Holland... :)

Just wondering... does raytracing get any easier to
understand if you think about light as electromagnetic wave
quanta?

Julius Klatte
http://surf.to/jkhome

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Ah, physics concerning ray-tracing, good to hear. Bad to implement. Ha ha! 
that's a joke, get it? Oh well...
Seriously though, I'd vote for the old bent straws going from camera to 
surface to light source, but think of the clutter. Oh, I was going to be 
serious. I'm out of here.

Message <3665d600.0@news.povray.org>, Julius Klatte  typed...
>
>Just wondering... does raytracing get any easier to
>understand if you think about light as electromagnetic wave
>quanta?
>
>Julius Klatte
>http://surf.to/jkhome
>

-- 
 omniVERSE: beyond the universe
  http://members.aol.com/inversez/POVring.html
=Bob

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Ronald L. Parker wrote:

> Photon mapping doesn't require any meshing.  Whether it can be
> smoothly added to POV is another question, but one which I hope to
> find an answer to once I get the superpatch where I want it.

Photon mapping (i.e. Nathan's patched 3.1a source [1]) works for me.
(I had to remove a call to a function like "WIN_something" in tokenize.c
which didn't exist on my Unixen, and remove his C++-style comments
(real CCs don't like them)).

It is probably the thing Dave was looking for.
Rendering time increses by a factor of 10 ... 100.

I did not look at the superpatch yet - Nathan's page mentions it
as "old" in a section which itself is called "Old News", so I
decided to ignore it.

Ralf

[1]: http://nathan.kopp.com/patched.htm

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