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I think think that's kind of a philosophical question. Wikipedia, for example, explains path tracing as integrating over incident light on a surface. You could
by Dave_Rosenthal 12y ago
I think think that's kind of a philosophical question. Wikipedia, for example, explains path tracing as integrating over incident light on a surface. You could either think of that as incident light at a point on a virtual film/sensor plane behind a lens or incident light on the first object you hit in the scene.
- ska 12y agoSuch techniques are often generally known as "Global Illumination". Often in physics based rendering you are attempting to estimate the BSDF (bi-directional scattering distribution function, often broken into T, transmission and R reflection) parts. This gets complicated by interactive media and subsurface scattering (i.e the photons go into a material and bounce around) but in the simple case of a surface interaction you are estimating an integral over solid angle for all light interactions. Monte Carlo path tracing is one way to do this estimation.