"jhu" <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> My question is: when would I use mcpov over radiosity? Also, is mcpov more
> condusive to multiple processors vs. than stock pov 3.6?

From what I've seen so far, I'd say you want to use mcpov when you want a shot
that doesn't show any artifacts whatsoever... provided you have enough time to
spend waiting for the render to... well... "finish", if that word makes any
sense in the mcpov context ;)

(Well, at least no lighting artifacts; it doesn't help with geometry issues.)

For some hard to grasp reason, I find that mcpov renders (and path raytraced
scenes in general, as it seems), have a certain very pleasing look - if the
geometry and the textures are done well, it all just seems "right".

Radiosity is good, given its speed. But there are some subtleties about a
radiosity-lit scene that make it somehow look inferior to mcpov renders; but
nothing that I could really put my finger on - it just doesn't have the same
look.


However, beware of media in mcpov - you can't use those reliably.

Likewise, beware of mirrors combined with radiosity in 3.6 - they make for some
nice artifact generators.

When speed is an issue, I guess mcpov is not what you want. But it maybe worse
on a single-core system than on a quad-core, because you can always run
multiple instances of mcpov, using different random seeds, to overlay them
later for a higher-quality shot.

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