Design And Implementation Of Environment Map Sampling And Rendering System

Illumination information in Real scenes can be stored as a High Dynamic Range of Environment Map which is called Environment Map for short. The pixels on the Environment Map indicate the light source on a spherical. The lighting direction is from the point of the spherical to the center of sphere. Illuminating all the fragment and vertex of a 3D scene with the light sources on the Environment Map can be realistic and this progress is called Environment Rendering. But to use all the pixels of an Environment Map needs great amount of calculation. So people have to adopt less point light source to replace the illumination of the whole Environment Map. This process is called Environment Map Sampling and the light sources are sampling points.The rendering based on Environment Map can be divided into two courses: Environment Map Sampling and three-dimensional scene rendering. This article describes a system integrates the function of the Environment Map Sampling and rendering. The system implements three Environment Map Sampling algorithms and basic rendering model. The system has friendly user interface and can view the Environment Map. It could sample and render automatically. Scalability of the system is good. It was easy to add other Environment Map Sampling method in the case of getting interfaces of other algorithm. The implementation of the system greatly reduces the experiment cost of the research in Environment Map Sampling.