I'm talking about correctness in the physical optics/lens sense. With lenses, light always passes uniformly through the aperture, where sphere sampling is non-uniform.
Intention is totally fine. This is reasonable if you actually intended to do something different than what a camera does, or if the intention is not physical correctness. This blog post seems to be intending to do something easy for picking samples, as opposed to something optically correct. I'm all for easy, but I also think it never hurts to understand the tradeoff you're choosing, nor to present the harder alternatives.
It's also worth considering disk sampling rather than sphere sampling, because it's barely any harder, and it will make the code converge to the same quality something like 2x faster. Sphere sampling spends too much time in the middle and not enough at the edges. Disk sampling only takes a teeny tiny bit more arithmetic. Jittering & QMC methods will also help a lot with efficiency.
yeah, i'm going for easy. and also, easily explainable. i like to leave some of the details up to whoever tries it. which is also why i generally don't include code anymore. i guess i could have had more references though.
sphere sampling has the appearance i want. but sampling inside discs with a probability over the disc radius would also work, probably. i didn't try it here.
Intention is totally fine. This is reasonable if you actually intended to do something different than what a camera does, or if the intention is not physical correctness. This blog post seems to be intending to do something easy for picking samples, as opposed to something optically correct. I'm all for easy, but I also think it never hurts to understand the tradeoff you're choosing, nor to present the harder alternatives.
It's also worth considering disk sampling rather than sphere sampling, because it's barely any harder, and it will make the code converge to the same quality something like 2x faster. Sphere sampling spends too much time in the middle and not enough at the edges. Disk sampling only takes a teeny tiny bit more arithmetic. Jittering & QMC methods will also help a lot with efficiency.