OllieBrown

After posting about my intention to calibrate the energy between photonmapping and raytracing 'res' sent me a message concerning attenuation. This reminded me that I had previously considered that light was being attenuated in the direct lighting raytracer but didn't seem to be in the photonmapper. I had left this in light of larger problems with the photonmapper but as res pointed out, it is critical to address this prior to calibration.

So, I explored the Light class and noticed that it has an internal mechanism to call an attenuation function that will attenuate for distance based on the attenuation coefficients and mode. I decided to move this function (ComputeAttenuation()) from the protected section of the class to the public section so I could access it from the photonmapping code. So now, each photon gets attenuated after each bounce by the distance it traveled according to the attenuation parameters of the light it was emitted from. This small change already made a big difference in the quality of the simulation! It also caused the calibration problem to become even worse as everything got noticeably dimmer in the photonmap.

So, now we're ready to calibrate. To do this, I adjusted the lights from 1.0 down to 0.1 in the world file in 0.1 increments (changing each color channel equally) and generated lightmaps that contained direct light only (one with raytracing, one with photon mapping). For now, I'm just trying to do a visual comparison between the results and scale the photonmapping version until it approximately matches the raytraced version. You can see the progress below. I will add more as I am able.

	Raytracer	PM Before	PM After
0.1
0.3
0.5
0.7
0.9