Delauney Triangulations and the Radiosity Approach

Abstract

The radiosity approach requires the subdivision of complex surfaces into simple components called patches. Since we assume to have constant intensity over a patch, the generation of regular patches is a desirable property of the subdivision algorithm. We show that constrained Delaunay triangulations produce patches that are as close to equilateral triangles as possible and thus are well suited for the partitioning of surfaces into patches. Since a number of optimal algorithms to generate constrained Delaunay triangulations have been published, the implementation presented here made use of the earlier work. The implementation consists of a rather simple modeling tool called POLY, a fast triangulation algorithm for arbitrary polygons and the form factor computation combined with a z-buffer output module.