Your First Lighting Model

Abstract

Diffuse lighting is great for rendering matte (nonshiny) objects, but we need a few more tools in our toolbox if we want to be able to properly render all the objects that a game might have. For example, plastics, metals, mirrors, and wet surfaces are all impossible to render well with just diffuse lighting. Instead, we need to learn some new lighting math to handle shininess. Almost nothing is entirely shiny, or entirely matte, so we’ll have to combine our diffuse lighting calculations with these new ones in order to be able to render everything well.