Radiosity

  Click here to download the program.

(Click here to enlarge)

     For those of you who don't know what radiosity is.  It's a very intricate style of lighting that simulates real-life lighting.  However, the method I use more closely resembles raycasting.  It'll take a light source and simulate hundreds or thousands of rays coming from it bouncing off the walls of a room hundreds of times.  In the process, you produce very realistic lighting with cast shadows and everything that you would want.  Radiosity is sometimes used in 3D rendering programs (not real-time).

     In this program, you can actually walk around the room, and take a close look at the soft shadows that are produced by the 1 million rays cast out across the room.  Yeah, that's right, 1 million.  I needed a few more than I originally expected.  The reason I can get away with this is that the 1 million rays have been calculated on my computer and lightmaps have been rendered.  So all you need are the lightmaps, which is very simple to implement.  The result is a very fast demo of radiosity rendered lighting.

REQUIREMENTS :
  P200, 32MB, with a decent video card that supports OpenGL.

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This page was last updated 04/19/07