The irradiance Jacobian for partially occluded polyhedral sources

The irradiance at a point on a surface due to a polyhedral source of uniform brightness is given by a well-known analytic formula. In this paper we derive the corresponding analytic expression for the irradiance Jacobian, the derivative of the vector representation of irradiance. Although the result is elementary for unoccluded sources, within penumbraethe irradiance Jacobianmust incorporate more information about blockers than either the irradiance or vector irradiance. The expression presented here holds for any number of polyhedral blockers and requires only a minor extension of standard polygon clipping to evaluate. To illustrate its use, three related applications are briefly described: direct computation of isolux contours, finding local irradiance extrema, and iso-meshing. Isolux contours are curves of constant irradiance acrossasurface that can be followed using a predictor-corrector method based on the irradiance Jacobian. Similarly, local extrema can be found using a descent...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1994
• Where: SIGGRAPH
• Authors: James Arvo
• Keywords: Computer Graphics, Irradiance, Isolux Contours, SIGGRAPH 1994, Vector Irradiance