Data Input/Output and Application Requirements
[Work Package 1]

Goals and Approach

The key purpose of the ARCADE project is to make radiosity useable. One of the first steps to take, when attempting to meet such a requirement, is to ensure that the models and lights which your future users want to use, are acceptable to your system. This is a primary rôle of WP 1. The work package includes three separate surveys of users, and future users, in industry. These surveys cover the following areas:

By taking note of the results of these surveys, the ARCADE consortium is producing software which is tailor-made for its end users.

Like many computer graphics algorithms, the radiosity method is sensitive to the quality of its input data. Suppose a user wants to include a statue in their scene, but some of the statue polygons are facing inwards, rather than outwards. If this error is left unchecked,

By using specialist software to carefully pre-process all input geometry, we ensure that we avoid these artefacts, and others caused by different cases of erroneous input.

As well as protecting against less-than-perfect input geometry, work package 1 also carries out pre-processing which goes beyond simply validating the geometry, to ensure that the data is ideally suited to the underlying, hierarchical clustering, radiosity approach. In this way, the radiosity software can maximise the assumptions that it makes about the geometry presented to it, and so optimise its performance.

A section of this site is password protected, as it contains restricted documentation, unsuitable for a public web site. A less-detailed, more focused, version of this site, is under construction.

The results of this work package are presented in the deliverables.