Area‐Preserving Parameterizations for Spherical Ellipses

We present new methods for uniformly sampling the solid angle subtended by a disk. To achieve this, we devise two novel area‐preserving mappings from the unit square 0,1]² to a spherical ellipse (i.e. the projection of the disk onto the unit sphere). These mappings allow for low‐variance stratified sampling of direct illumination from disk‐shaped light sources. We discuss how to efficiently incorporate our methods into a production renderer and demonstrate the quality of our maps, showing significantly lower variance than previous work.