What we have accomplished?

Now you may be asking: is all of this physics information really important in the final analysis of material creation? And the answer, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is yes. The adage he who does not know where he has come from, cannot know where he is going would apply perfectly here.

You see whenever we take a photograph, all of these complex interactions between light and matter are already at work and so produce the scene that we see before us. In order to create a photographic-looking render of an environment, we will of course need to recreate, at least to a reasonable degree, the manner in which these light and solid matter interactions take place.

Of course, the programmers at Chaos Group have taken care of huge chunks of this by creating lighting and material tools that do most of this work for us. We can, however, enhance the work they have done (and so of course, improve the final results of our own rendered images) by taking the time to understand the workings...