| 摘要 |
A system and method of determining, and subsequently using in a rendering engine, an illumination map. The illumination map is employed by the rendering e ngine to avoid having to calculate the contributions of lights in the scene during render ing, thus reducing the rendering time. In one embodiment, the system and method is used to determine the illumination values from the contribution of one or more lights to one or mo re texture mapped objects. This illumination map can either be stored independently of the texture picture to be mapped or can be combined with the texture picture to obtain an il luminated texture picture for subsequent rendering independent of the light sources. In an other embodiment, the present invention is used to determine the illumination values f or one or more objects represented by a polygon mesh. This illumination map can be stored independent of the material and color of the object or can be combined with the color and material information and stored in the object definition. In either of these cas es, this illumination map represents the illumination values at the vertices of the polyg ons, the rendering engine and/or hardware linearly interpolating the remainder of the ren dering information for each polygon. The illumination values can be determined either b y summing the contribution of the lights in a scene at points of interest or by evaluating the entire shade tree defined for the scene at those points of interest. In this latter case, the contributions of reflections, refractions, transparencies and any procedural functions defined fo r the scene are considered in determining the illumination values. Evaluation of the entire shad e tree also allows other options, such as the ability to generate 2D textures from procedura l 3D textures or to generate a texture that contains the result of a blending between multiple textures.
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