[Radiance-general] organizing scenes with many light sources

[Lars O. Grobe]

Hi!

I am running in trouble (and into the limits of my cpu ressources) with 
a scene that contains simply too many light sources. It is a huge room 
lid by groups of small light (oil lights), all in all there are 
thousands... Rendering is getting really slow now, and I wonder how to 
get the most of the scene without loosing to much visual accuracy.

So far, I use a radiance sphere with a light modifier and xform these 
spheres to all the positions in my room. I guess, as the sphere is a 
basic and native radiance primitive, it should not make a big difference 
if I use a sphere, a polygon or any other primitive here? I remember 
that this question had been on this list some years ago, but I was not 
able to find any post in my archives. I also believe to remember that 
there has been someone doing renderings of whole star fields with 
thousands or millions of sources, am I dreaming or are there some 
projects out there like that?

When I know how to load the light sources, the next is which settings to 
use rendering them. They are all extremely small compared to the room. I 
was also thinking if it might be worth to wrap them into an illum "box", 
so that for at least the ambient calculation, the groups of "point" (in 
fact sphere) sources would appear as uniform area light sources.

Thank you for sharing ideas and experiences, at the moment I am not able 
to get any result in a reasonable time.

CU Lars.
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