level of detail

Rory Driscoll had a good post in his blog a few months ago reminding everyone about energy conservation in lighting models.  Energy conservation simply means that the amount of reflected energy from a point is equal to the amount of energy incident to that point.  This is particularly noticeable in specular reflection models where the overall brightness of the specular term changes with the specular exponent.

Anyway, there were a few good replies to his post with derivations of the normalization terms required to conserve energy provided by Fabian “ryg” Giesen of Farbrausch. The lighting models used by most games won’t account for energy conservation across diffuse and specular terms but adding a normalization term is a simple step to take.

Wow.. I’ve been a pretty crummy blog-keeper the past few months. I have good reasons, though. Since April, I have started a new job, moved twice, bought my first house and had a daughter! Allison Olivia was born a little over two weeks ago and has changed everything for me and my wife. I’ll refrain from going on and on about how precious she is.

Me and My Leaf Node

Now that I’ve got all of these major life changes out of the way, I’m hoping to get back to regular updates on the blog. In the meantime, everyone should check out the Trine demo. Great looking 3D side-scroller with physics-based gameplay.