The State of the Art in Physically-based Rendering and its Impact on Future Applications

The simulation of global illumination has become a major focus in computer graphics, as physically based and accurate computation techniques are developed. We review some of the most recent advances, such as incremental radiosi ty computations for changing environments, and the simulation of arbitrary reflectance distributions. A discussion of persistent problems in physically-based illumination simulation follows, with an emphasis on the design issues faced by application developers.