Contents  What is radiosity?  Real-time  Radiosity:  Impossible?  The Method  The Reason  The Development  The Application  of Rules  The Last Necessity  The Realization  Basic Outline  Conclusion  Printable version     The Series  Part I  Part II

The Reason for Radiosity

One of the C-key features in Blender was radiosity. However, there was a problem with it. The main problem I found was that it was not dynamic. What you did was you loaded the meshes (that you wanted to have radiosity calculated for) into the radiosity feature (which was practically a separate program). Then, you told it to calculate the radiosity for them. Once it had finished, you then spit the subdivided meshes back out into the actual scene. So, you couldn't calculate the radiosity once for each frame, you could only calculate it for one, and that had to be used for all frames.

The second problem was that it was slow. It used the traditional style of calculating radiosity, which is slow! Extremely slow! Other then that, I had no problem with the Blenders radiosity. In other words, everything except for the end image was bad. At that point in time I wished two things:

1. I wished I had the C-key.
2. I wished there were a faster and more easily dynamic method for calculating radiosity.

The strange thing about what happened next was that I never sought out to develop a faster radiosity algorithm. In fact, the idea actually came to me at a time where I wasn't even thinking about radiosity at all, it came while I was watching TV.

Next : The Development