Radiosity with Blender
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Using Radiosity with Blender

The Radiosity helps to achieve a photographic quality rendering : radiosity takes into account all light interactions between two close objects. The result is spectacular most of the time. Xavier Michelon has written an article on linuxgraphic where he explains more-in-deep the concept of radiosity.


A glimpse to what we will render during this tutorial

Blender use Radiosity in its own special way. In any classical renderer, the calculation of radiosity is made during the final rendering. Blender uses a different approach which could surprise the newcomer. After having created the scene, the calculation of a radiosity solution is made. The result of this calculation is then stored as VertexPaint in a self created material, and the whole scene is replaced by this vertexpainted solution. You can then separate the different items, add textures to them, lighting, and make renderings from any point of view. Because the radiosity solution is linked to a material, you don't have to recalculate it for each point of view you decide, so this speeds up the rendering. Unfortunately, this approach is barely useful during an animation, because when an object is moved, the radiosity solution is not re-calculated.

-->Pre-requisites in order to understand and go through this tutorial: