Advanced Lighting and Materials with

The world around us is filled with subtle
lighting effects, but until recently it was not
possible to duplicate these real-world effects in computer
games because of the limits of consumer graphics
hardware.
Advanced Lighting and Materials with Shaders explains
the principles of lighting theory and discusses how
to create realistic lighting that takes full advantage
of the capabilities of modern hardware. Topics include
the physics of light, raytracing & related techniques,
objects & materials, lighting & reflectance models, implementing
lights in shaders, spherical harmonic lighting, spherical harmonics
in DirectX, and real-time radiosity.
- Understand the
underlying physics of light & energy;
- Learn
about the visual features of different materials and
how they can be modeled for real-time graphics;
- Find out about the different lighting models;
- Discover how real-time techniques compare to ray
tracing;
- Learn to use the provided shader
implementations to implement lights & realistic materials in
real time.
On the CD: All the code
in the book with resources (models, textures, probes,
etc.) needed to run the programs, along with
the SDKs and libraries needed to build the
programs; Luminance Radiosity Studio, an advanced radiosity program.