A global illumination solution for general reflectance distributions

  • Authors:
  • Françis X. Sillion;James R. Arvo;Stephen H. Westin;Donald P. Greenberg

  • Affiliations:
  • Program of Computer Graphics, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY;Program of Computer Graphics, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY;Program of Computer Graphics, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY;Program of Computer Graphics, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 18th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
  • Year:
  • 1991

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

A general light transfer simulation algorithm for environments composed of materials with arbitrary reflectance functions is presented. This algorithm removes the previous practical restriction to ideal specular and/or ideal diffuse environments, and supports complex physically based reflectance distributions, This is accomplished by extending previous two-pass ray-casting radiosity approaches to handle non-uniform intensity distributions, and resolving all possible energy transfers between sample points. An implementation is described based on a spherical harmonic decomposition for encoding both bidirectional reflectance distribution functions for materials, and directional intensity distributions for illuminated surfaces. The method compares favorably with experimental measurements.