Lighting Basics
This type of light is used in a scene to ensure that no areas are completely black, even if no direct light reaches them.
What is ambient light?
Unlike ray tracing, this global illumination method only tracks diffuse inter-reflections.
What is radiosity?
This term describes materials that let some light through but scatter it, unlike full transparency.
What is translucency?
This type of occlusion technique approximates soft shadows by estimating light blockage in ambient light.
What is ambient occlusion?
In ray tracing, this spatial data structure helps speed up ray-object intersection checks.
What is a Hierarchical Bounding Box (HBB)?
This type of light has direction but no position, simulating light from a distant source like the sun.
What is directional light?
This process maps how light interacts with a surface by using captured or simulated data from different angles.
What is BRDF (Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function)?
This technique allows small-scale bumps to appear on a surface without modifying the mesh geometry.
What is bump mapping?
In toon shading, this is one method used to create bold, cartoon-like outlines around objects.
What is silhouette edge detection?
This rendering technique splits a frame across machines.
What is distributed rendering?
Use in spot lights, its the soft edge of a shadow caused by an area light.
What is the penumbra angle?
This rendering technique traces paths of light backward from the camera, but includes more random sampling and is better at caustics.
What is path tracing?
These types of images store surface normals to simulate lighting without geometric complexity.
What are normal maps?
This method of shadow generation uses shadow volumes and a counter to determine if a point is in shadow.
What is the shadow volume algorithm?
Rendering video over a network requires consideration of latency, data size, and this critical resource which can affect render times.
What is bandwidth?
This type of lighting uses an image (like an HDRI) to simulate realistic lighting environments.
What is image-based lighting?
This 2 global illumination technique simulates complex lighting interactions, reflections and volumetric effects using light stored in maps, energy thresholds and the Russian roulette probability method.
What is photon mapping?
Using a height field and texture, this advanced mapping technique creates the illusion of depth and occlusion.
What is parallax mapping?
True or False: In the shadow volume algorithm, the shadow counter can become negative.
What is true?
This alternative to simulating full caustics trades accuracy for speed by faking the light concentration effect.
What is caustic texture mapping (or fake caustics)?
Compared to frontal lighting, this lighting setup is harder in digitally due to the amount of fine details revealed and its brightness in certain areas.
What is back lighting?
This technique simulates realistic lighting using multiple render passes from the light’s perspective, but still remains efficient.
What is shadow mapping?
These textures are calculated mathematically and used in displacement maps for implicit surfaces.
What are procedural textures?
This projection-based technique can simulate soft shadows, but it's less accurate for complex lighting.
What are planar projection shadows?
This image optimization technique stores progressively lower-res textures but can result in loss of sharp detail.
What is mipmapping?