Environment Lighting
I've been working on Google's open source web component, <model-viewer> , for about a year and a half now, which marks the length of time I've been working on (or even known the term) physically-based rendering (PBR). I have to admit I was rather baffled by the term when I first heard it, as how else would you color the pixels of a screen to show a 3D object than by using the physics of light? In case this weren't already obvious, this post is going to be bit more technical than the average; you have been warned. Anyway, I was certainly no expert when I set about to improve the accuracy of our rendering in <model-viewer> and three.js , the renderer upon which we built. As I reviewed the literature I realized there was still room for improvement as most of the research had gone toward games and movies, which have very different requirements than e-commerce. For us, moving lights and complex scenes are not the norm, but accurate renditions of materials are k