A new radiosity approach by procedural refinements for realistic image sythesis
Min-Zhi Shao, Qunsheng Peng, Youdong Liang · ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics · 1988
According to the rendering equation, the diffuse and the specular components of the outgoing intensity of each surface patch should be solved simultaneously. Rather than establishing a huge set of linear equations defining the unknown directional intensities for all directions and all surface patches, we expand the concept of the delta form-factor which concerns the light energy transfer of a surface patch along a respective direction. As the delta form-factor for non-diffuse surface patches are dependent on the spatial and spectral distributions of light energy, they could not be calculated geometrically. In this paper, we present a new radiosity approach which progressively approximates the delta form-factors and the light energy distributions within a general environment to the correct solution. The nucleus of our approach is procedural iteration. Statistics indicate the potentials of this method for complex non-diffuse environments.