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Radiosity Method
Radiant Flux Transfer Method
(Term of computer graphics)
A computer graphics method to calculate diffuse
light distribution and reflection in three dimensional
environments (the "global illumination model").
In contrast to raytracing, all variants of the
radiosity method have in common, that they seperate the process
of shading surfaces and the visible-surface determination.
They first compute the interaction of light (radiant flux)
with all surfaces in a scene, and then determine visibility of
the allready shaded surfaces from different viewpoints.
Radiosity is very efficient to compute scenes
up to a certain complexity with large numbers of light sources.
Its special strength is in providing the illumination
data for many different viewpoints (animation) of a scene.
Computing very large and complex scenes with radiosity
methods requires extreme amounts of memory (RAM).
Specular effects like metallic reflections are very
difficult to simulate this way.
Recently, the term radiosity is increasingly used to
describe the general problem class of solving the
global illumination model, and especially the
complementary method of distributed raytracing.
This misattribution causes a lot of confusion even
among computer graphics specialists.
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