Putting It Together
Ray tracers are best known for mirrors and glass. Take some time and experiment, to see why. Here are a few tips for figuring out how to employ reflection and refraction effectively in your scenes.
- We tend to think of glass as exclusively transparent, but no one is surprised to look in a window and see their own ghostly reflection superimposed over the scene. When rendering glass or any similar material, set both transparency and reflectivity to high values, 0.9 or even 1. This allows the Fresnel effect to kick in, and gives your material an added touch of realism!
- Because the reflected and refracted colors are added to the surface color, they’ll tend to make such objects brighter. You can tone down the material’s diffuse ...