A New Radiosity Apporach Using Area Sampling for Parametric Patches

A high precision illumination model is indispensable for lighting simulation and realistic image synthesis. For the purpose of improving realism, research on global illumination has been done, and several papers on radiosity methods have been presented. In the most recently proposed methods, the shapes of light sources and objects are restricted to polygons or simple curved surfaces. We present a more general method which can handle the kind of free-form surfaces widely used in industrial products and in architecture. The method proposed here solves the problem of the interre ection of light (i.e., radiosities) between patches, and form-factors, which play an important role in this process, are precisely calculated without aliasing through the use of an area sampling method (i.e., pyramid tracing). Furthermore the method can handle both non-uniform intensity curved sources and non-di use surfaces.