> So... the pretrace step... Is the video from that used for anything? Or
> is the only purpose of this step to fill up the cache?
>

Its just to seed the cache with values (somewhat evenly distributed over the
scene space).

>
> ...does all of this mean that the diffuse highlight options don't affect
> radiosity?
a>

What I said doesn't lead to that conclusion. However, those faked diffuse
highlights (phong, specular) are indeed deliberately disabled for radiosity
gather
rays "since this causes problems with colors being far to bright"(quoted
from lighting.cpp Diffuse_One_Light() ).

> Also, while we're on the subject, does radiosity take (specular)
> reflection into account as well? (Never tried it, but I assume it does...)

Yup, real specular reflection (not the faked highlights) is taken into
account! I've been having some fun with that lately, by disabling the
irradiance cache and taking samples for every pixel. It's slow, but
beautiful and funn :) The fun part is that I HAVE written software that
lets me (and hopefully you sometime) render in parallel, so I don't go
crazy waiting for the render :)

George

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