Cálculo do Fator-de-Forma exato entre áreas diferencial e finita usando CSG

Abstract

The Ray-Tracing and Radiosity methods are the main representatives of the method that solve the global illumination problem. In both mthods it is necessary to know the energy tranfer ratio between two areas. This ratio, called form factor, is one of the key concepts in Radiosity methods and is being more frequently used in Ray-Tracing methods with finite area light sources. There are many methods for the computation of the form factor, most of them are approximative due to a matter of performance, but, in some specific cases, the extra computational effort needed to compute the exact value of the form factor can improve the overall performance of the illumination method. In general, in these cases, the computational effort needed to obtain an acceptable approximation of the form factor outweighs the effort necessary to compute the exact value. Furthermore there are situation, for example, shadow boundary shading, in which a high precision is far more important than a performance gain. In this work we present a method to compute the exact form factor between a finite area and a differential area which uses CSG techniques to identify the ooccluded areas of the source.