概述:
The spherical harmonic (SH) basis functions are an orthonomal basis defined over the
unit sphere; they are essentially a generalization of the Fourier basis to that domain
(Section 7.1.1). Recall that the Fourier transform makes it possible to express many
functions as weighted sums of sinusoids; the SH basis can do the same for directionally
varying functions on the sphere and are thus a useful basis for many rendering problems.
The SH basis will be used for all of the precomputed light transport algorithms in the
remainder of this chapter.
The spherical harmonic functions are defined over a series of Lmax bands, where
each band l has indices m=−Lmax, . . . , Lmax. Thus, if we wanted to use bands up to
Lmax = 1 to represent a function in