To enable radiosity computation, you must first open the Shading panel by using either the Managers > Shading command.
Once opened, the Shading panel displays five tabs (Surface, Light, Image, Rendering, and Output) on the upper left corner. Select the Rendering tab: the first column on the left displays the Rendering chain, which lists, among others, the Radiosity option. Checking the radio button on enables the radiosity computation and allows you to modify parameters that are displayed in the column beside.
The radiosity value of a surface (the rate at which light energy leaves the surface) is the sum of the rate at which the surface emits energy and the rate at which it reflects energy reaching it from other surfaces.
Every patch is considered to be both an emitter and a receiver of energy. As more and more iterations of this process are made, the radiosity values of each patch get progressively closer to those which would be the case in reality. Actually, such a progressive approach allows an initial approximation of the final solution to be generated quickly by setting a low quality level, and the quality of the image to be improved by increasing the quality level.
solidThinking allows the user to select a quality setting in an intuitive way, by specifying an overall Quality value from 0 to 9. The default value is 2, with 0 indicating low quality and 9 indicating very high quality.
Being view-dependent, the radiosity solution automatically avoids doing large numbers of calculations where they are unnecessary, since the surfaces involved are out of view.
Performance is optimized wherever possible, in accordance with the settings specified by the user, so that the required results are achieved as quickly as possible. It is only when very high quality results are required that a great deal of time will be taken.
Units of Length
One important point to note about the radiosity processor is that by default all dimensions are assumed to be presented in meters. The radiosity processor needs to be told explicitly what units should be used.
See also: