A global illumination solution for general reflectance distributions

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.