Quote - Poser uses this or something like this:

http://www.siggraph.org/education/materials/HyperGraph/raytrace/radiance/indirect.html

This stuff was added to Firefly - didn't come with Firefly.

Its chief advantages:

If you never see an object and/or the objects you see cannot see that object, it does not cost anything to light it - it doesn't light it. Some other algorithms work out all the lighting in your virtual world, even if you can't see it. Some don't.

If you're willing to allow for loss of details (in the lighting, not in the textures) then you can use lots of caching and skip lots of calculations. This is the irradiance cache control you have in Poser.

 

In other words, the most important goal is speed. Speed over quality. I.e. quality not so good as other renderers that users are OK letting run for 4 days.

Note: You can turn off Posers irradiance cache, and let it run for 4 days. It will do the same as a lot of other good biased renderers. It will not do as well as unbiased renderers, which basically don't try for speed at all. They try for simulating actual bouncing bits of light, i.e. photons. The really good ones take into account the frequency (color) of those photons and make them bounce differently based on that. Poser won't do that no matter how long you give it.

 

 

lighting an atrium is a branch of render science all it's own.

i think this is a render : http://www.siggraph.org/education/materials/HyperGraph/raytrace/radiance/fig17.gif

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