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by andrew3726 2880 days ago
This is also very important in many global illumination techniques which requires sampling the hemisphere around a point. As case in point a simple Monte Carlo path tracer uses this to sample random directions, see e.g. [0]. In addition to this there are many 'tricks' one can use to reduce the variance/noise using a differently weighted sampling (to help the converge of MC). A nice technique to get a cosine-weighted hemisphere sampling is to generate a random point on the unit disc and then project them onto the (hemi)sphere. Seems somewhat relevant here.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_tracing#Algorithm