I often stray into my own little corner of odd-ball conceptual doodling but I believe this concept is one of the few real gold nuggets in my pyrite mining.
While gathering the scraps of understanding about the Strombine lighting technique to create a layman's wiki about the topic, I became curious about ways to make the method less cumbersome. It dawned on me that the painstaking process of collecting orthographic views and creating light textures from them was very much akin to collecting evnshot\cubemaps of the scene. Further, if we are trying to simulate Radiosity and "bounced light" it would be more accurate for each light to make it's own casting ambient. That way all light sources would accumulate into a realistic final render. The additional advantage is when one light is extinguished the accompanying ambient projection can be extinguished along with it. Since the ambient lights do not case shadows or incur other heavy CPU or GPU penalties the overlapping light sources should not be as much of a burden. I conjectured about constraining the projections with a reverse falloff image. Finally all I needed was a way to remove all the color from the scene to collect the envshot with the bounced lights. I was fortunate enough to have none other than Rich_is_Bored (of Modwiki and Doom3word.org fame) provide the solution. Now I just need some experiment time to see how it looks and performs...
You can read about the concept in the Light Textures and Falloff Images wiki article at The Dark Mod site.
