Textures and radiosity

In this paper we discuss the efficient and accurate incorporation of texture maps into a hierarchical Galerkin radiosity algorithm. This extension of the standard algorithm allows the use of textures to describe complex reflectance and emittance patterns over surfaces, increasing the realism and complexity of radiosity images. Previous approaches to the inclusion of textures have either averaged the texture to yield a single color for the radiosity computations, or exhaustively generated detail elements—possibly as many as one per texture pixel. The former does not capture important lighting effects due to textures, while the latter is too expensive computationally to be practical.