Ray Tracing from the Ground Up

Chapter 25

Glossy Reflection

Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you should:

• understand what glossy reflection is;
• understand how it can be modeled in ray tracing;
• have implemented glossy reflection in your ray tracer;
• have more tools to produce nice images.

In this chapter, you will learn how to render glossy reflections. Many real materials are imperfect reflectors, where the reflections are blurred to various degrees due to surface roughness that scatters the incident radiance. The use of glossy reflections will allow us to remove the main inconsistency discussed in Section 24.4 by treating specular highlights and reflections in a consistent ...