Computer Graphics Through OpenGL, 2nd Edition

Chapter 11

Color and Light

Our objects so far have mostly looked as if they plan to spend the afternoon home watching the game. It’s time now to dress them up and go party. The goal for this chapter is to learn how to use light sources to illuminate a scene and complementarily define material properties of objects to determine how they appear when lit.

We begin with a brief discussion of the theory of vision and color models in Section 11.1, learning particularly about the RGB color model so important in CG, as well as a few other models which pop up occasionally, such as CMY, CMYK and HSV. In Section 11.2 we study Phong’s lighting model and how it conceives of light coming off an object as comprised of three components – ambient, diffuse and ...