Hypercube Algorithm for Radiosity in a Ray Tracing Environment

Two different approaches to realistic image synthesis are Ray tracing and radiosity. Each method falls short in their attempts to model global illumination present in most environments. A more general model includes the specular and diffuse reflection of both these methods but the combination requires prohibitive computation. The algorithm presented here extends the standard ray tracing algorithm by adding diffuse rays, while eliminating unnecessary radiosity calculations. The data separation used here is based on the heuristic that light rays, as well as shadow rays intersect objects which are nearby more often those that are more distant. Although that heuristic seems sound, its accuracy is being tested by monitoring the results of prccessing a large number of different scenes of various complexity.