12.4 Area Lights

Area lights are defined by the combination of a Shape and a directional distribution of radiance at each point on its surface. In general, computing radiometric quantities related to area lights requires computing integrals over the surface of the light that often cannot be computed in closed form, though they are well suited to Monte Carlo integration. The reward for this complexity (and computational expense) is soft shadows and more realistic lighting effects, rather than the hard shadows and stark lighting that come from point lights. (See Figure 12.15, which shows the effect of varying the size of an area light source used to illuminate the dragon; compare its soft look to illumination from a point light in Figure 12.3.)

The DiffuseAreaLight class defines an area light where emission at each point on the surface has a uniform directional distribution.

Its constructor, not included here, sets the following member variables from the parameters provided to it. If an alpha texture has been associated with the shape to cut away parts of its surface, it is used here so that there is no illumination from those parts of the shape. ^† (Recall that alpha masking was introduced in Section 7.1.1.) The area of the emissive Shape is needed in a number of the following methods and so is cached in a member variable.

A number of parameters specify emission from DiffuseAreaLights. By default, emission is only on one side of the surface, where the surface normal is outward-facing. A scaling transform that flips the normal or the ReverseOrientation directive in the scene description file can be used to cause emission to be on the other side of the surface. If twoSided is true, then the light emits on both sides.

Emission that varies over the surface can be defined using an Image; if one is provided to the constructor, the surface will have spatially varying emission defined by its color values. Otherwise, spatially uniform emitted spectral radiance is given by a provided Lemit spectrum. For both methods of specifying emission, an additional scale factor in scale is applied to the returned radiance.

Recall from Section 12.1 that the Light interface includes an L() method that area lights must implement to provide the emitted radiance at a specified point on their surface. This method is called if a ray happens to intersect an emissive surface, for example. DiffuseAreaLight’s implementation starts by checking a few cases in which there is no emitted radiance before calculating emission using the Image, if provided, and otherwise the specified constant radiance.

Two cases allow immediately returning no emitted radiance: the first is if the light is one-sided and the outgoing direction faces away from the surface normal and the second is if the point on the light’s surface has been cut away by an alpha texture.

The AlphaMasked() method performs a stochastic alpha test for a point on the light.

If an Image has been provided to specify emission, then the emitted radiance is found by looking up an RGB value and converting it to the requested spectral samples. Note that the coordinate is inverted before being passed to BilerpChannel(); in this way, the parameterization matches the image texture coordinate conventions that were described in Section 10.4.2. (See Figure 6.26 for a scene with an area light source with emission defined using an image.)

For convenience, we will add a method to the SurfaceInteraction class that makes it easy to compute the emitted radiance at a surface point intersected by a ray.

All the SampleLi() methods so far have been deterministic: because all the preceding light models have been defined in terms of Dirac delta distributions of either position or direction, there has only been a single incident direction along which illumination arrives at any point. This is no longer the case with area lights and we will finally make use of the uniform 2D sample u.

The second variant of Shape::Sample(), which takes a receiving point and returns a point on the shape and PDF expressed with respect to solid angle at the receiving point, is an exact match for the Light SampleLi() interface. Therefore, the implementation starts by calling that method.

The astute reader will note that if an image is being used to define the light’s emission, leaving the sampling task to the shape alone may not be ideal. Yet, extending the Shape’s sampling interface to optionally take a reference to an Image or some other representation of spatially varying emission would be a clunky addition. pbrt’s solution to this problem is that BilinearPatch shapes (but no others) allow specifying an image to use for sampling. To have to specify this information twice in the scene description is admittedly not ideal, but it suffices to make the common case of a quadrilateral emitter with an image work out.

If the sampled point has been masked by the alpha texture, an invalid sample is returned.

If the shape has generated a valid sample, the next step is to compute the emitted radiance at the sample point. If that is a zero-valued spectrum, then an unset sample value is returned; calling code can then avoid the expense of tracing an unnecessary shadow ray.

The PDF for sampling a given direction from a receiving point is also easily handled, again thanks to Shape providing a corresponding method.

Emitted power from an area light with uniform emitted radiance over the surface can be computed in closed form: from Equation (4.1) it follows that it is times the surface area times the emitted radiance. If an image has been specified for the emission, its average value is computed in a fragment that is not included here. That computation neglects the effect of any alpha texture and effectively assumes that there is no distortion in the surface’s parameterization. If these are not the case, there will be error in the value.