Topic awaiting preservation: radiosity! WOW!

played around with radiosity in POV-Ray3.5.
look at the inner areas of the table. smooth, realistic shadows. yeeha!
interesting is also the strange reflection of the sphere! see those brown circles on the ground?
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Hmm... those dark circles on the ground shouldn't be there. I think you need to fiddle with the radiosity settings to make the shadows smoother, they should disappear eventually.

they appeared as soon as i added the sphere.
but your right, no sphere makes that strange effects in reality. but its interesting!

very nice radiosity

Can some one please explain to me what exactly radiosity is? I have this vaugue idea that it doesn't involve raytracing and its purpose is to lighten up shadows instead creating large blocks of blackness. But thats really all I know and it isn't much. What kinda scenes is it best for and how is it actually done?

Schitzoboy

from the POV-Ray help-file:
Radiosity is a lighting technique to simulate the diffuse exchange of radiation between the objects of a scene.

all i did, was the advanced tutorial in version 3.5 for this.

Notice how if you put a brightly colored object next to a white object in real life, often ambient light reflecting off the brightly colored object will make the white object tinted that color. That's what radiosity simulates. It also helps make shadows more realistic, since light reflecting off of objects from other parts of the scene may make parts of the shadows lighter. My SlimeCam uses radiosity (the old, Mega-POV version). It looks amazingly flat without it. It lets the light coming through the windows light up the whole room.

btw: slime, have you done all those slimeys in POV-Ray too? are they open-source? hehe

Heh, yup, they're all in a file called Slime.inc along with a bunch of targa image maps of eyes and mouths. =)

Dunno about open source though =)

Radiosity basically simulates how real light, photons, bounces off things [its absorbed and re-emitted] this gives things near to things the colour of other things. Hehe. So if you have like a a white ball in a red room it will get a nice red tinge around the edges ,depending on how strong you set it up. which can look quite like real life. Soft shadows, and caustics come into this as well.

Well, in POV-Ray, caustics are done separately, via Photons. But I believe you're right about the majority of 3D programs.