Advanced Global Illumination, 2nd Edition

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 ...