Adv. Lighting & Shading

Just a few things that you might want to think about:

- Per-pixel lighting
- Parallax mapping
- Ambient occlusion
- Radiosity
- Spherical harmonics / PRT
- Alternative lighting models (Cook-Torrance, Oren-Nayar, ect)
- Any of the 3 million shadowing techniques out there (Cascaded SM)

Moved to GP&T for further discussion

I guess you drew the short straw by having to present on a topic you're unfamiliar about? [lol]

You really need to refine your title - it's sufficiently broad and covers around FOUR DECADES of research and implementation. That's simply too much content to cover in any detail - so you either want to just create a list of techniques or you want to pick 1-2 subsets and explain them in a bit of depth.

Real-time rendering typically still uses BRDF-based lighting on effectively a Phong shading framework. Information you can find that refers heavily to shaders is likely to be taking this (or a similar) approach.

Individual BRDF's can get a little complex, but its very easy to cover some of the highlights and explain the key terms.

Non real-time rendering is more into the 'global illumination' field - you're talking about ray-tracing, photon mapping, radiosity and so on... I've not done much here, but have a flick around on Wikipedia or google for some high level information on those.

Then, as Dustin mentioned, there's PRT/SH - in my book I argued against it as a robust solution but it definitely has its uses and blurs the line between the two categories I just outlined.

I highly recommend you pick up a copy of Advanced Lighting and Materials with Shaders - it's a very well written and easy to read text and gives a good overview of a lot of the current techniques. It also includes a lot of introduction to the basic concepts and the 'language' used in lighting/shading.

hth
Jack