Introduction to Spherical Harmonics for Graphics Programmers

Introduction to Spherical Harmonics for Graphics Programmers published on Apr 12 2026 On your computer graphics journey, you will eventually run into some paper or code mentioning spherical harmonic functions. They are indeed a very useful tool: with just a few coefficients, they allow us to approximate a given function defined on a sphere. This can be very useful for modeling complex lighting. While spherical harmonics are a very well studied subject, trying to make sense of them can still be..