specular

You'll notice that in this person's test shots, he has no specular light or sunlight in the images.

Alternatively, a brief and by no means comprehensive list of things I've found to be better in Renderman versus Cycles: * Bidirectional pathtracing and VCM for fast, accurate caustics and SDS (specular-diffuse-specular) illumination without fireflies.

One thing, that might be specific to my renderer implementation - the specular reflection seems to be point sampled.

Maybe you want it to support normal maps, or opacity maps, or specular maps, or glow maps.

The technology will recede from its specular, media-driven attention and just become how things are done.

If it hits a specular surface, bounce off based on the surface and ray orientations, and recurse when you hit another surface.

You can then do view space specular and you do transparent objects as a separate pass just like you do with deferred.

Most toy ray tracers only handle specular reflection and transmission, and direct illumination.

So each color there is a superposition of two: the ambient color of the dress and the specular reflection of the light source.

For specular lights we currently use only cube maps with different resolutions (some also have a blur effect added).

Eyes are tough because they're naturally specular, transparent in places, and refractive.

Old GL has no normal maps, no opacity maps, no specular maps.

"Phong" refers to two distinct but related things: The Phong reflection model (Ambient + Diffuse + Specular) and Phong shading (normal vector interpolation).

:) I've added in "real" specular (it was "fake" prior), and probably went a bit too crazy with the specular highlights.

This has its advantages and disadvantages, the biggest advantage being that it's "view independent." Since there's no specular reflection, a surface looks equally bright from any direction, and you don't need to recalculate anything if you move the camera.