Comments on: The Future of Triangles Part 4: Pie in the Sky https:/2008/09/the-future-of-triangles-part-4-pie-in-the-sky/ Developer resources for the X-Plane flight simulator Tue, 01 Feb 2011 18:54:17 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6.1 By: Benjamin Supnik https:/2008/09/the-future-of-triangles-part-4-pie-in-the-sky/#comment-918 Sat, 18 Oct 2008 08:31:00 +0000 http://www.x-plane.com/dev_blog/?p=297#comment-918 Dr-Vlat,

Yes – we could do fake reflections with environment maps, and fake per-pixel specular hilites with environment maps.

In the specular hilite case, I think per-pixel lighting is a better choice because environment maps can produce poor per-pixel hilites if the texture res isn’t high enough…when shaders weren’t available they were a great work-around, but now per-pixel lighting is attainable on most cards, and the results look better than an environment map.

For true reflections, we could do a fake environment map – I don’t know how convincing it would be. A dynamic one would look good, but that costs real computing power.

]]> By: dr-vlat https:/2008/09/the-future-of-triangles-part-4-pie-in-the-sky/#comment-919 Sat, 18 Oct 2008 03:17:00 +0000 http://www.x-plane.com/dev_blog/?p=297#comment-919 Dear Ben!

Isn’t there a way to utilize a “fake” reflections just by using phong shading, pre-calculating specular maps realtime by using a polygon normal values ? Yes, it’s a bit “fake” reflection, but it works, it shines, and even on 386 processors 15 or more years ago this approach worked with more than affordable speed.

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