A Closed-Form Solution for the Irradiance due to Linearly-Varying Luminaires

We present a closed-form expression for the irradiance at a point on a surface due to an arbitrary polygonal Lambertian luminaire with linearly-varying radiant exitance. The solution consists of elementary functions and a single wellbehaved special function that can be either approximated directly or computed exactly in terms of classical special functions such as Clausen’s integral or the closely related dilogarithm. We first provide a general boundary integral that applies to all planar luminaires and then derive the closed-form expression that applies to arbitrary polygons, which is the result most relevant for global illumination. Our approach is to express the problem as an integral of a simple class of rational functions over regions of the sphere, and to convert the surface integral to a boundary integral using a generalization of irradiance tensors. The result extends the class of available closed-form expressions for computing direct radiative transfer from finite areas to differential areas. We provide an outline of the derivation, a detailed proof of the resulting formula, and complete pseudo-code of the resulting algorithm. Finally, we demonstrate the validity of our algorithm by comparison with Monte Carlo. While there are direct applications of this work, it is primarily of theoretical interest as it introduces much of the machinery needed to derive closed-form solutions for the general case of luminaires with radiance distributions that vary polynomially in both position and direction.