Chapter Twelve Light Sources

In order for objects in a scene to be visible, some of them must emit light that is eventually reflected back to the camera. This chapter introduces the abstract Light class, which defines the interface used for light sources in pbrt, as well as the implementations of a number of useful light sources. By hiding the implementation of different types of lights behind a carefully designed interface, the light transport routines can operate without knowing which particular types of lights are in the scene, similar to how the acceleration structures can hold collections of primitives without needing to know their actual types. This chapter only defines the basic light functionality because many of the quantities related ...

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