Spherical harmonic lighting (original) (raw)

Spherical harmonic (SH) lighting is a family of real-time rendering techniques that can produce highly realistic shading and shadowing with comparatively little overhead. All SH lighting techniques involve replacing parts of standard lighting equations with spherical functions that have been projected into frequency space using the spherical harmonics as a basis. To take a simple example, a cube map used for environment mapping might be reduced to just nine SH coefficients if preserving high-frequency detail is not a concern.