[Radiance-general] Radiance Vs Radiosity

[Mark de la Fuente]

Rob, Could not agree more.  I think people put quite a bit of stock in a
well rendered image and the arguments can get blurred.  Especially when
you are talking about something as subjective as lighting as a whole. 
Are you after accurate results for research purposes, close enough
results, convincing pictures, etc?  I know we have some very impressive
images here in our office that were developed with the latest
Lightscape/Viz that look (and were developed to look) identical to the
photos they were extrapolated from.  And the associated false color
images actually gain a certain amount of credibility based simply on how
"real" the renderings look.  Which as you pointed out has nothing to do
with the accuracy of the calculation result since the ray-traced part
does not affect the numerical results!  ;)
 
Mark
 
 
 
I think some confusion stems from the fact that Lightscape & Viz have a

ray-tracing capability that you can apply, as a post-process.  When you

apply that to a Lightscape/Viz model, the specular reflections are 
*rendered*, but not *calculated*.  So you have a rendering that looks 
somewhat accurate, but at that point that's all you have.  You cannot 
derive quantitative luminance/illuminance information from the image at

that point.  That data always comes from the radiosity-calculated 
model, and that's fundamentally flawed because of the lack of specular

reflections (and in Lightscape's case, no diffuse transmissions 
either).

=================
    Rob Guglielmetti
www.rumblestrip.org

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://radiance-online.org/pipermail/radiance-general/attachments/20040525/b5ad5d02/attachment.htm