Physically Based Rendering, 2nd Edition

Chapter Fifteen Light Transport I: Surface Reflection

This chapter brings together the ray-tracing algorithms, radiometric concepts, and Monte Carlo sampling algorithms of the previous chapters to implement a set of integrators that compute scattered radiance from surfaces in the scene. Integrators are so named because they are responsible for evaluating the integral equation that describes the equilibrium distribution of radiance in an environment (the light transport equation). As the SamplerRenderer uses the Camera to generate rays and then finds intersections with scene geometry, information about the intersections is passed to the Surfacelntegrator and the Volumeintegrator that the user selected; together these two classes are responsible ...