Indigo in Laymans terms

[Anthony]

Is there any place where I can find out how indigo works, for curiosity's sake, without any crazy math equations. And also side effects from the system and stuff like that?

[SimonLarsen]

I have no idea how Indigo or any other renderer works, but I just found these three links in a hurry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raytracing

http://www.devmaster.net/articles/raytr ... /part1.php

http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/metro/

[Nettahcs]

http://ompf.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=92

[Anthony]

Ok.....
Still don't really get it cause Im dumb lol
So it basically shoots out rays from the camera that like find colours and stuff or check for light? And it like mixes each of the checks together
Hmmmm. Do they rays go back to the camera when the die or something, is that bidir

[CoolColJ]

read

http://rivit.cs.byu.edu/a3dg/publicatio ... torial.pdf

[Anthony]

That is a dumbed down version? I'm sorry but anything with math in it I will never understand Cept for 2+2=5
All I know is it makes paths and looks at them unbiasedlylylly. It would be probably better if someone just told me in their own words if they can be bothered

[CoolColJ]

hmmmm

To synthesize a realistic image on a computer system is to solve the light transport problem. One way to solve the problem is to sample light transport paths originating from light sources and ending at the lens of a virtual camera. Path tracing algorithm(Kajiya, 1986) does just this and can produce realistic and unbiased images, that usually suffer from noise but converge to the correct result. There are certain situations where the path tracing algorithm is inefficient. Scenes containing strong indirect light-ing, caustics and small geometric holes are especially hard to render with it. In contrast, the Metropolis Light Transport (MLT) algorithm (Veach & Guibas, 1997) excels in these kind of hard lighting situations.The key idea of MLT is to reuse light transport paths that make contribution to the final image. These paths are generated by mutating existing paths. A mutation could move vertices on a path, delete a part of the path or add new vertices. Once an important path is found, the path space is explored locally around it. There are a number of different mutation strategies, each of which are designed to help in specific lighting situations. Probabilities play a key role in MLT. Each mutation has a carefully chosen acceptance probability, so that mutations are either accepted or rejected based on the relative contribution to the final image.

[Gog]

Side effects are simple, long hours staring at a monitor screen while deciding if you need just one more update

[CoolColJ]

one thing I like about Indigo is that a long render time doesn't really feel as bad as a long render time in other renderers like Fry/Maxwell and much better than GI renderers..

I think it's because you can see a frequent update vs the other unbiased renderers, and you can see the whole image already vs GI renderers