Light, materials and shaders, oh my!

[Iridyse]

So, this is actually a quick introduction to properties of light and materials and shaders and such, mainly aimed at students of CG (and well more experienced users who forget stuff :)) but I think it is also great reading for everyone who paints. While you don't have to remember indices of refraction and all the shading models out there and such, I think reading through the article will hopefully help you observe a little more critically.

http://www.subdivisionmodeling.com/forums/showthread.php?p=47434

(my apologies if this has been posted before, couldn't find it)

[Kaycy is tanning]

Thanks a lot. A very good book on this is: Computer Graphics by Foley / van Dam. Really technical though.

You can learn so much from computer lighting since it's all simplified.

The one thing I found extremely obvious, is hard edged shadows on a diffuse scene, that totally breaks immersion. Games still use hard edged shadows often, but they don't use black (luckily), they use a midtone to duplicate the diffuse, but often they still don't have soft shadow edges since that would require multiple lighting passes.