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 last necessity

The last thing that needed to be added to the method was light. In other words, you couldn't just map the texture onto the object, you had to use the color values as light values. The reason for that is that if you did not, you would never see the color of the texture in completely dark areas, which would completely eliminate the point of the algorithm.

So, you would light the world like normal, and then you render the cube view for all objects, and use the method I described to blur and map the UV coordinates onto the object. After that, you added all of the color values of the cube-view texture maps to the light values of the object. You would then render the scene.

Ton again

I franticly logged onto the net and e-mailed Ton, outlining my method in detail. His reply to my message was that that method had already been developed, and it was called "hemicubes". I was extremely disappointed. I had thought that I had come up with something new, and it turned out that it already existed. So, I decided to do some quick research on hemicubes.

What I found out was that hemicubes was not the same thing as my method. In fact, there was only a single similarity: the cube view rendering. Other then that, it was pretty much completely different. It was used in a completely different way! Instead of mapping it onto the object, it rendered a separate half-cube view for every polygon of the model. In fact, it was merely a modification of the traditional method of radiosity! It was used as a replacement of measuring the distance between polygons. IT wasn't at all the same!

So, I e-mailed Ton back, carefully outlining the differences. He agreed with me that my method was different. However, he still wouldn't put it in Blender... at least, not yet. The main reason behind that was that he had other things that he felt were more important to implement. And I could definitely understand that.

But I was still disappointed. I was hopping to see my method in action. And I didn't want to implement it my self because I had no base 3d renderer to program it for, and I didn't want to take the time to program one merely to test out a single idea of mine.

Next : The Realization