Anyone heard of the theory of radiosity?

Graphics and GPU Programming Programming

Started by Agent December 29, 2001 01:54 AM

4 comments, last by Agent 22 years, 3 months ago

122

Author

December 29, 2001 01:54 AM

I vaguely heard about it from a friend of mine. Its sposed to be a miracle mathematical equation that can used for really fast and concise 3d game source code. Just wondering if there was someone here who knew a tad more about it than me. -Agent "I will enjoy watching you die, Mr. Anderson." - The Matrix

It puts the Lotion on!

Kippesoep

892

December 29, 2001 02:14 AM

Well, I hate to burst your bubble, but there''s no miracle equation that''ll ensure "really fast and consise source code".

As for radiosity, it is a method of calculating lighting in a more realistic matter. Instead of having objects either being lit by lightsources directly or being in the shadows, it takes into account light reflected from other surfaces. This, as you can probablyimagine, is a relatively slow process. Although there are tricks to speed it up, it''ll be a while before we see true real-time radiosity.

Kippesoep

alexk7

138

December 29, 2001 02:20 AM

I don''t know a lot about it but it''s surely not a way to render fast 3d scenes. It''s a method to create more realistic lights and is usually slower than other methods. It is used in pre-rendered computer generated images and slowly appears in run-time engines as hardware is evolving.
The theory has something to do with the fact that every object in real world reflect some light on surrounding objects.

alexk7

Anonymous

December 29, 2001 02:22 AM

Well, radiosity can often be faster than distributed ray tracing or other techniques that handle reflections between diffuse surfaces, but the calculations can not be performed in real-time on home computers for any scene of non-trivial complexity. Many 3d games with static environments do use radiosity to precalculate the lighting of the surfaces in the environment and store the results in textures, lightmaps, that are combined in real-time with whatever detail textures are supposed to be on those surfaces.

Henry