Contents  What is radiosity?  Real-time  Radiosity:  Impossible?  The Method  The Reason  The Development  The Application  of Rules  The Last Necessity  The Realization  Basic Outline  Conclusion  Printable version     The Series  Part I  Part II

Basic outline of radiosity mapping

This last section is a quick list of all of the steps in radiosity mapping.

1. render cube view from object origin.
2. blur cube view so that all pixels contribute their color equally to the half of the cube view closest to them.
3. use normal mapping to acquire UV coordinates for each vertex of the mesh.
4. texture map the cube view onto the object, except DO NOT USE PIXEL COLORS AS YOU WOULD NORMALLY, instead, use the pixel colors as lighting values, and add those light values to the light already present on the object from traditional lighting methods.
5. Render the scene with it's new light values.

Optimizations

There are some rather obvious optimizations that could be implemented along with this radiosity method. I am going to lightly outline the ones that I have thought of in this section.

The first one is to not do full texture mapping for the cube view. Instead, only find the light values for each vertex in the mesh, and then interpolate.

The second one is that you could ignore the radiosity calculation of static objects, and only do radiosity mapping for dynamic objects. You could pre-calculate the radiosity for static objects by using traditional methods. Then, for the dynamic objects light contribution to the static objects, you could pre-calculate a volume of light-contribution values that moved with the object. Then, as the light of one part of the dynamic object changes, so does the corresponding section of volume. The volume would move with the object. Then, you light the static objects according to the light volumes of the dynamic objects.

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