Advanced Global Illumination, Second Edition, 2nd Edition

Chapter 6

Stochastic Radiosity

The algorithms discussed in the previous chapter directly compute the intensity of light passing though the pixels of the virtual screen. In contrast, this chapter covers methods that compute a so-called world space representation of the illumination in a three-dimensional scene. Very often, this object space representation consists of the average diffuse illumination on triangles or convex quadrilaterals into which a three-dimensional model has been tessellated. There are, however, plenty of other possibilities, too. Since diffuse illumination is best modeled by a quantity called radiosity (see Section 2.3.1), such methods are usually called radiosity methods.

The main advantage of computing the illumination in ...