Emitter.h File Reference

Abstract representation of emittance defined at a single point on a surface in 3-space (describing a light). More...

#include <materials/BSDF.h>

Go to the source code of this file.

Classes
class	Emitter
	Abstract representation of emittance defined at a single point on a surface in 3-space (describing a light). More...

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Detailed Description

Abstract representation of emittance defined at a single point on a surface in 3-space (describing a light).

Author:

Travis Fischer (fisch0920@gmail.com)

Matthew Jacobs (jacobs.mh@gmail.com)

Date:

Fall 2008

The reason Emitter subclasses BSDF is for convenience during generation and evaluation of paths in bidirectional path tracing. Emittance at a point in a given direction, Le(x,wo), is broken into two parts, Le0(x), and Le1(x), as originally detailed by Veach and Guibas (see Eric Veach's thesis, section 8.3.2). Scattering at a vertex can then be uniformly viewed as evaluation / sampling of a BSDF, including initial, fake 'scattering' at a light source, which can be viewed as a special case of scattering with no incident vector (the incident vector is thus disregarded).

See also:

Emitter::getBSDF() or the Path class for more details.

Definition in file Emitter.h.