Overview

In Chapter 6, you added lights to simulate a realistic view of the Villa Savoye model. You added a standard directed light to simulate the sun; then you added Omni lights to simulate light that's reflected off the building surfaces as indirect light. This method of simulating the natural behavior of light is sometimes referred to as "fakiosity" and can be quite useful when you are in a hurry to get a rendering out. In this chapter, you'll create the same scene as in Chapter 6, but this time you'll use a VIZ feature known as radiosity.

As mentioned in Chapter 1, radiosity rendering is a method whereby the behavior of light is more accurately modeled to create an almost lifelike representation of a scene. Radiosity takes into account the way light bounces off surfaces, and it picks up and reflects the color and intensity of this bounced light. Instead of having to add Omni lights as you did in Chapter 9, you can add a single Sun light and have VIZ determine the way light bounces off surfaces and illuminates the scene. Another tool, called ray tracing rendering, also models the behavior of light, but in a different way. Ray trace rendering is best suited for rendering very shiny or transparent material such as glass or mirrors. Radiosity and ray trace rendering together are considered to be a class of rendering called global illumination.