“A global illumination solution for general reflectance distributions” by Sillion, Arvo, Westin and Greenberg

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.

1. Buckalew, Chris and Donald Fussell. “Illumination Networks: Fast Realistic Rendering with General Reflectance Functions,” Computer Graphics, 23(3), July 1989, pages 89- 98. (Proceedings SIGGRAPH ’89 in Boston.)
2. Cabral, Brian, Nelson L. Max, and Rebecca Springmayer. “Bidirectional Reflection Functions from Surface Bump Maps,” Computer Graphics, 21 (4), July 1987, pages 273-28 !. (Proceedings SIGGRAPH ’87 in Anaheim.)
3. Cohen, Michael E, Shenchang Eric Chen, John R. Wallace, and Donald P. Greenberg. “A Progressive Refinement Approach to Fast Radiosity Image Generation,” Computer Graphics, 22(4), August 1988, pages 75-84. (Proceedings SIGGRAPH ’88 in Atlanta.)
4. Cohen, Michael F., Donald P. Greenberg, David S. Immei, and Philip J. Brock. “An Efficient Radiosity Approach for Realistic Image Synthesis,” IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 6(3), March 1986, pages 25-35.
5. Cook, Robert L., Thomas Porter, and Loren Carpenter. “Distributed Ray Tracing,” Computer Graphics, 18, July 1984, pages 137-147. (Proceedings SIGGRAPH ’84 in Minneapolis.)
6. Courant, R. and D. Hilbert. Methods of Mathematical Physics, Interscience Publishers, Inc., New York, 1953.
7. Goral, Cindy M,, Kenneth E. Torrance, Donald P. Greenberg, and Bennett Battaile. “Modeling the Interaction of Light Between Diffuse Surfaces,” Computer Graphics, 18{3), July 1984, pages 213-222. {Proceedings SIGGRAPH “84 in Minneapolis. )
8. He, XiaoDong, Kenneth E. Torrance, Franqois Sillion, and Donald P. Greenberg. “A comprehensive Physical Model for Light Reflection,” Computer Graphics, 25(4), August 1991. (Proceedings SIGGRAPH ’91 in Las Vegas.)
9. Heckbert, Paul S. “Adaptive Radiosity Textures for Bidirectional Ray Tracing,” Computer Graphics, 24(4), August 1990, pages 145-154. (Proceedings SIGGRAPH ’90 in Dallas.)
10. Himlan, Theodore H., Michael C. Monks, Stephen H. Westin, Donald P. Greenberg, and Kenneth E. Torrance. “Physical Measurement Techniques for Improving and Evaluating Computer Graphic Simulations” January 1991. (Submitted for publication.)
11. Immel, David S., Michael E Cohen, and Donald P. Greenberg. “A Radiosity Method for Non-Diffuse Environments,” Computer Graphics, 20(4), August 1986, pages 133-142. (Proceedings SIGGRAPH ’86 in Dallas.)
12. Kajiya, James T. “The Rendering Equation,” Computer” Graphicsl 20(4), August 1986, pages 143-150. (Proceedings SIGGRAPH ’86 in Dallas.)
13. Le Saec, Bertrand and Christophe Schlick. “A Progressive Ray-Tracing based Radiosity with General Reflectance Functions,” June 1990. (Proceedings of the Eurographics Workshop on Photosimulation, Realism and Physics in Computer Graphics (Rennes, France).)
14. Nishita, T. and E. Nakamae. “Continuous Tone Representation of Three-dimesional Objects Taking Account of Shadows and lnterreflection,” Computer Graphics, 19(3), July 1985, pages 23-30. (Proceedings SIGGRAPH ’85 in San Francisco.)
15. Press, William H., Brian P. Flannery, and Saul A. Teukolsky. Numerical Recipes, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1986.
16. Rushmeier, Holly E. and Kenneth E. Torrance. “Extending the Radiosity Method to Include Specularly Reflecting and Translucent Materials,” ACM Transactions on Graphics, 9( 1 ), January 1990, pages 1-27.
17. Sillion, Franqois and Claude Puech. “A General Two-Pass Method Integrating Specular and Diffuse Reflection ” Computer Graphics, 23(4), August 1989. (Proceedings SIG- GRAPH ’89 in Boston.)
18. Wallace, John R., Michael E Cohen, and Donald P. Greenberg. “A Two-Pass Solution to the Rendering Equation’ a Synthesis of Ray-Tracing and Radiosity methods,” Computer Graphics, 21(4), July 1987, pages 311-320. (proceedings SIGGRAPH ’87 in Anaheim.)
19. Wallace, John R., Kells A. Elmquist~ and Eric A. Haines. “A Ray Tracing Algorithm for Progressive Radiosity,” Computer Graphics, 23(3), July 1989, pages 315-324. (Proceedings SIGGRAPH ’89 in Boston.)
20. Whitted, Turner. “An Improved Illumination Model for Shaded Display,” Communications of the ACM, 23, 1980, pages 343-349.