Appendix A
A Class Library for Global Illumination
Global illumination is all about generating paths connecting a virtual camera with a light source. In this appendix, we propose a library of software classes that will facilitate generating such paths in a computer program, by hiding the details of geometry and materials representation and ray casting from a higher-level algorithm implementation.
The library offers the following building blocks:
- Classes for representing path nodes, such as a point on a light source, a surface scattering point, the viewing position, etc. (Section A.1).
- Classes for light source sampling. These classes generate path nodes that serve as the head of light paths (Section A.2).
- Support classes, representing a virtual ...
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