In this paper, we present a new mathematical foundation for image-based lighting. Using a simple manipulation of the local coordinate system, we derive a closed-form solution to the light integral equation under distant environment illumination. We derive our solution for different BRDF's such as lambertian and Phong-like. The method is free of noise, and provides the possibility of using the full spectrum of frequencies captured by images taken from the environment. This allows for the color of the rendered object to be toned according to the color of the light in the environment. Experimental results also show that one can gain an order of magnitude or higher in rendering time compared to Monte Carlo quadrature methods and spherical harmonics.
We present a closed-form expression for the irradiance at a point on a surface due to an arbitrary polygonal Lambertian luminaire with linearly-varying radiant exitance. The solution consists of elementary functions and a single well-behaved special function that can be either approximated directly or computed exactly in terms of classical special functions such as Clausen’s integral or the closely related dilogarithm. We first provide a general boundary integral that applies to all planar luminaires and then derive the closed-form expression that applies to arbitrary polygons, which is the result most relevant for global illumination. Our approach is to express the problem as an integral of a simple class of rational functions over regions of the sphere, and to convert the surface integral to a boundary integral using a generalization of irradiance tensors. The result extends the class of available closed-form expressions for computing direct radiative transfer from finite areas to differential areas. We provide an outline of the derivation, a detailed proof of the resulting formula, and complete pseudo-code of the resulting algorithm. Finally, we demonstrate the validity of our algorithm by comparison with Monte Carlo. While there are direct applications of this work, it is primarily of theoretical interest as it introduces much of the machinery needed to derive closed-form solutions for the general case of luminaires with radiance distributions that vary polynomially in both position and direction. We consider the rendering of diffuse objects under distant illumination, as specified by an environment map. Using an analytic expression for the irradiance in terms of spherical harmonic coefficients of the lighting, we show that one needs to compute and use only 9 coefficients, corresponding to the lowest-frequency modes of the illumination, in order to achieve average errors of only 1 . In other words, the irradiance is insensitive to high frequencies in the lighting, and is well approximated using only 9 parameters. In fact, we show that the irradiance can be procedurally represented simply as a quadratic polynomial in the cartesian components of the surface normal, and give explicit formulae. These observations lead to a simple and efficient procedural rendering algorithm amenable to hardware implementation, a prefiltering method up to three orders of magnitude faster than previous techniques, and new representations for lighting design and image-based rendering.