| A Fast Algorithm for Illumination From Curved Reflectors (2008) | |||||||||||||
Abstract | |||||||||||||
| that allowed an exact computation of the reflected illumination from curved mirror surfaces onto other surfaces (see Figure 1). That superb work was based on Fermat’s principle, which says that this computation is equivalent to finding extremal paths from the light source to the visible surface via the mirrors. Once pathways were found, irradiance was computed from the Gaussian curvature of the geometrical wavefront. Another approach is bi-directional ray tracing 4, but it has as a major drawback: the inherent high computational cost of ray tracing. In this sketch, I present a high-speed scan-line based algorithm to achieve the same effect. The key ideas on which the whole work is based are: • There is no light-reflecting mirror that is not “seen ” by the light sources. • We can think of the whole process as if each curved reflector that receives light acts as a secondary light, that is, transforms itself into a non-isotropic extended light source. • We can perform Phong-like interpolation, within a certain error, of any | |||||||||||||
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