Global illumination

One common approach is to compute the global illumination of a scene and store that information with the geometry (e.g., radiosity).

The algorithms used to calculate the distribution of light energy between surfaces of a scene are closely related to heat transfer simulations performed using finite-element methods in engineering design.

Well known algorithms for computing global illumination include path tracing, photon mapping and radiosity.

The following approaches can be distinguished here: In Light-path notation global lighting the paths of the type L (D | S) corresponds * E. A full treatment can be found in [3] Another way to simulate real global illumination is the use of high-dynamic-range images (HDRIs), also known as environment maps, which encircle and illuminate the scene.

It uses lattices and spherical harmonics (SH) to represent the spatial and angular distribution of light in the scene.