Description

A careful look at the real world and you begin to realize that most of the detail you see is a result of subtle lighting effects. Your perception of reality is affected by very subtle changes in the way light interacts with the objects around you. Therefore, if your goal is to recreate reality (or to create a new reality), you must include as many of these effects as possible.

Advanced Lighting and Materials with Shaders explains the principles of lighting theory and discusses how to create realistic lighting that takes full advantage of the capabilities of modern hardware. The book starts by explaining the underlying principles of lighting theory, but distinguishes itself from most titles quickly by providing practical examples using specific techniques to detail the theory. Topics include the physics of light, modeling real-world light, raytracing and related techniques, objects and materials, lighting and reflectance models, implementing lights in shaders, spherical harmonic lighting, spherical harmonics in DirectX, and real-time radiosity.

The CD-ROM contains all of the source code used in the sample applications, the resources (models, textures, probes, etc.), along with the SDKs and libraries needed to build them. The applications were written with OpenGL and DirectX. In some cases, both are used for a given technique. In other cases, only one is used either because the other implementation is unnecessary (it is supported in a helper library, e.g. D3DX) or because porting one implementation to another is trivial (e.g. HLSL to OpenGL/Cg).

Paperback: 370 pages
Publisher: Wordware Publishing, Inc. (November 2004)
ISBN: 1556222920
Level: Advanced
Category: Graphics/animation/game development