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.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 25th, 2009 at 12:24 pm and is filed under Game techniques, Links. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.