Following on from the previous artefact this is the second part of the lighting chapter. This time I will be looking at how light reats on objects such as glass, metal and pool balls. I will be looking at how light reflects and refracts, the uses of caustics and also investigating how to mimic these with the same effects to save rendering time.
From the previous we can see that effective lighting can be used to invisage realism, here we see how this is done.
The specular look that can be created in 3DS Max is easy enough to accomplish and it can be produced to simulate light hitting objects in the real world. Below is a picture of a set of pool balls. Each of them has a distinctive specular mark.
Looking closer at one of the balls it can be seen that this specular area isn’t just a highlight but a reflection.
Of the lights overhead. So using specular highlighting in 3DS MAX is not following the real world precisely, but the advantages are that it can mimic real world lighting
So due to the nature of the pool ball having a specular surface my mini experiment will be to see if having just a specular surface will suffice in 3DS Max or will having a reflective map on the material increase/decrease realism. Finally the rendering times will be assessed to see if the best ‘visual’ outcome will indeed match the rendering output time and to see if it is worth it.
