Specular-Inclusive Radiosity

Traditional radiosity renderers are excellent at handling diffuse lighting, but the model doesn't account for specular reflections. The most common method of incorporating specular reflections into a radiosity rendered scene is to use a ray tracer after the radiosity rendering and add the lighting effects together. We've devised a technique we believe will allow radiosity renderers to include specular reflection as part of the general model, eliminating the need for ray traced specular lighting, and overall improving the radiosity model. The course of this research will span creation of a traditional radiosity renderer, followed by it's modification to include specular lighting.

The renderer is a semester long research project by Steve DiVerdi and Jason Wither, under the advisement of Proessor Z Sweedyk, at Harvey Mudd College.

Currently, we're working on specular component.

The project resources

• Jason's CS155 Final Paper on Radiosity
• Scene Datastructure UML
• Render Flowchart
• Project Breakdown
• Fisheye Math
• Material Properties
• Specular Form Factor Calculation

Pictures!

• box.ray
• room during day from the back
• room during day from the back, with interpolation
• room during day from the front
• room during day from the front, with interpolation

Links

• Introduction to Radiosity
• Lightscape - radiosity renderer
• Lightscape's Technology White Paper
• An Empirical Comparison of Radiosity Algorithms

All materials copyright 2002 Harvey Mudd College