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The lit-tensor idea is actually inspired by lit-lines, or illuminated streamlines, which were presented at Viz '96, and are related to ideas that David Banks published in Siggraph '94. The motivation for lit lines is that they can help disambiguate the orientation of the streamlines in a vector visualization. This image is from the Viz '96 lit-lines paper. The highlights on these really help give you a sense of how these streamlines are twisting and turning around. So I wanted a shading model for tensors to include lit-lines as a special case, for the sitatuation of total linear anisotropy, where the motion is entirely constrained to a one-dimensional path. On the other hand, if there's planar anisotropy, and its like a sheet, then I want to emulate standard Phong surface shading.