In 1900, Max Planck developed the modern theory describing the radiation field of a blackbody. At the time, there were two distinct models for blackbody radiation: the Rayleigh-Jeans law, which fit the measurements well at low frequencies, and Wien’s law, which worked well at high frequencies, but neither worked everywhere. Planck, by making the ingenious assumption that the energy of the modes...

Point-Based Global Illumination (PBGI) is a popular rendering method in special effects and motion picture productions. This algorithm provides a diffuse global illumination solution by caching radiance in a mesh-less hierarchical data structure during a pre-process, while solving for visibility over this cache, at rendering time and for each receiver, using microbuffers, which are localized de...

The incident indirect light over a range of image pixels is often coherent. Two common approaches to exploit this inter-pixel coherence to improve rendering performance are Irradiance Caching and Radiance Caching. Both compute incident indirect light only for a small subset of pixels (the cache), and later interpolate between pixels. Irradiance Caching uses scalar values that can be interpolate...

A primary impact of urbanization on the local climate is evident in the phenomenon recognized as the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect. This urban thermal anomaly can increase the health risks of vulnerable populations to heat waves. The surface UHI results from emittance in the longer wavelengths of the thermal infrared; however, there are also urban anomalies that are detectable from radiance in...

Architectural walkthroughs require fast global illumination algorithms and also accurate results from certain viewpoints. This paper introduces a global illumination method that combines several strategies to meet the contradicting criteria of architectural walkthroughs. The methods include parallel and perspective ray-bundle shooting and ray shooting. Each method is designed to randomly approx...