#Radiosity
>>Actually, radiosity rendering is not commonly found in raytracers<<
Excellent point, John, and the primary reason why many of the RT scenes I have
seen lately look hopelessly flat. I was recently visiting a large game company
in LA, whose Mac-based 3D group were "busily" waiting around for a bunch of
PowerMacs to RT 3D scenes for their games.
After looking at some of the finished examples in which the foreground and
backround lacked any sort of depth, I asked how many light sources were used in
the scene. "Oh, we only use one light for raytracing", the art director said.
"The renderer does all the work in this program, not like those nasty
scanline-based renderers where you've gotta simulate ambient light all the
time. And besides, the more lights you add, the longer it takes to render, you
know." I just said "Uh, yeah, um, looks real nice…"<g> Poor guy had no clue.
The bottom line is that, until Radiosity is a viable function for desktop
systems (Next year? Tomorrow? I really don't know), part of the Art of 3D scene
creation (for many of us) is gonna be creative lighting techniques that give
the illusion of light and the way it disperses itself in any given situation.
I'm sure you know this well from your lighting backround; how you can create
depth in any scene with a nice lighting set-up.
3DS gives us many ways to simulate ambient and direct light, and therefore
makes it possible to get great depth in 3D scenes with very short rendering
times. And this is one of the definitions of a production-oriented system,
IMHO.
-Alan