Radiosity methods are techniques for calculating radiative transfer. They were originally introduced in the field of heat transfer, and are descibed in many heat transfer textbooks (e.g. the undergraduate text by Incropera and Dewitt (1990), or the graduate text by Siegel and Howell (1981)). Since calculating global illumination is a radiative transfer problem, radiosity methods have been adapted to image synthesis, beginning with the work of Goral et al. (1984) and Nishita and Nakamae (1985). Over the past seven years many papers describing variations of the radiosity method for rendering surfaces have been published. In these notes, the use of these variations for rendering volumes will be considered. This material can be found in more detail in Rushmeier and Torrance (1997) and Rushmeier (1988)
