G lobal I llumination C ompendium

T he C oncise G uide to G lobal I llumination A lgorithms

Albrecht Duerer, Underweysung der Messung mit dem Zirkel und Richtscheyt (Nurenberg, 1525), Book 3, figure 67.

Update: August 29, 2003

There is finally an update for the GI Compendium. The publishing of the book Advanced Global Illumination has taken most of my time during the past 18 months, so that's why the Compendium was not updated as frequently as it should. Expect more updates on a more regular basis from now on!

This page contains the Global Illumination Compendium , an effort to bring together most of the useful formulas and equations for global illumination algorithms in computer graphics. I first distributed early versions of this document in 1999 when I was a post-doc at the Program of Computer Graphics at Cornell University.

This collection of formulas and equations is supposed to be useful for anyone who is active in the field of global illumination in computer graphics. I started this document as a helpful tool to my own research, since I was growing tired of having to look up equations and formulas in various books and papers. As a consequence, many concepts which are trivial to me are not in the Compendium, unless someone specifically asked for them. Therefore, any further input and suggestions for more useful content are strongly appreciated.



Philip Dutré (Philip.Dutre@cs.kuleuven.ac.be)



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Most Recent Version: September 29, 2003,

68 pages, 121 items!

Updates since August 29, 2001

Mostly errors corrected in existing items.

Questions & Answers

Why is formula/equation such-and-so not included?



In its current state, there are indeed many useful equations or formulas not yet included. If you feel it would be useful to include something, please let me know, and I'll try to include it in the next version. If you could also give one or more references where I can find the stuff, that would be helpful, especially if it is something not widely known in the graphics community.

There is an error in item x!



Send me an email, and I'll correct it ASAP!

I can't print or view the document!

I haven't paid much attention to this so far. I can only tell you how the documents were generated. The original document is edited using FrameMaker 6.0 on a PC using WinNT, and then saved as PostScript. Then Acrobat Distiller (version 4) was used to generate the PDF file.

Some Useful Global Illumination Links

Local

Test Scenes for Global Illumination: some rendering using my own JAVA path tracer

Literature

Software