| Abstract: | This paper presents a new view-independent, energy equilibrium method for determining the light distributed in a complex 3D environment consisting of surfaces with general reflectance properties. The method does not depend on discretization of directions or discretization of surfaces to differential elements. Hence, it is a significant improvement over the earlier complete view-independent method which is computationally intractable for complex environments or the hybrid methods which include an extended view-dependent ray tracing second pass. The new method is based on an efficient data structure of order O(N2) called the spherical cover. The spherical cover elegantly captures the complex multidimensional directional nature of light distributed over surfaces. Subdivision techniques based on range estimation of various parameters using interval-arithmetic-like methods are next described for efficiently computing the spherical cover for a given 3D environment. Using the spherical cover, light is progressively propagated through the environment until energy equilibrium is reached. Complexity analysis of the propagation step is carried out to show that the method is computationally tractable. The paper also includes a comprehensive review of earlier rendering techniques viewed from the point of view of capturing the multidimensional nature of light distribution over surfaces. |
