Caustic Shading

Caustics are a type of reflective lighting which bring greatly enhanced realism to a virtual environment. They are a refinement on raytracing (or alternatively on raycasting), in which additional calculations start when the light rays hit an object with a refractive index greater than 0, and a transparency greater than 0. In other words, an object that is partially transparent and scatters the light.

Caustic shading then, is essentially a secondary lightsource of reflected light, which casts an inverted shadow – a bright shape – on other surfaces. To save processing power of course, only those reflections as seen by the user's viewpoint are rendered. Caustic shading can recreate effects such as the glowing crescent on the desk below a backlit glass, or the flickering patterns of reflected light on a wall above a pool of water.

See Also: Raytracing, Raycasting, Scanline Rendering, Caustic Network, Volumetric Caustics, Photon Mapped Caustics, Caustics

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Caustic Shading

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