Adding Lighting Effects

Lighting in computer graphics serves the same purpose as it does in the real world. It provides definition to the rendering of objects, making them seem embedded in the virtual world. The way that light is perceived depends on the surface treatment of the objects. These treatments are defined as materials and will be discussed in the next section.

Light sources consist of three primary lighting interactions:

• Ambient light represents the background light in an environment that doesn’t emanate from anywhere. It’s like the light that you can still see in a room when all the lights are out, but you can still make out the shapes of objects because light might be leaking into the room through windows. It is light that has been reflected and scattered so much that you can’t tell where it is coming from. It’s a basic coloring and although it doesn’t emanate from a particular source, in computer graphics, it is assigned as...