"Anthony D'Agostino" <gam### [at] contastnet> wrote:
> That's a nice effect. You say it's noisy and can get slower for complex
> scenes. Sunflow has fast and clean AO, you should check out the source and
> see if you can get some ideas.

I would need to do comparisons for speed and quality (and download the JDK),
something I can't really do at the moment on this laptop. In a week I'll be
rid of it and be able to take up your suggestion. Thanks for drawing my
attention to sunflow, though, it looks really nice. Another good one
(although it's not open source) is Kerkythea. I haven't used it myself it
but it seems to have global illumination methods for almost every occasion.

> Also, Blender's AO is very slow if you have a large object (like a large
> quad for a floor), but you can speed it up by a factor of 2 or 3 if the
> octree is larger. You probably know this already, but I thought I'd mention
> it.

I'm afraid I'm using the intersection finding system as a black box at the
moment. I might look at intersection issues once I'm sure I'm taking the
"best" samples possible, but the intersection code in POV is probably not
improvable, at least by me. I *think* the size issue might be negated for
some shapes by POV's bounding slabs, but I know little about it.

I'm wary of looking at blender too closely, because of the license and
because I haven't seen nice AO results from blender yet, their example
images all seem really tiny.

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