4 ms·

I think you might be getting confused in the different lighting models. IRL there is no hard difference between specular and diffuse surfaces, that's a separati

I think you might be getting confused in the different lighting models. IRL there is no hard difference between specular and diffuse surfaces, that's a separation we've made in rendering for convenience. A raytraced pbr scene will use the normal and the roughness to determine the grouping of the resulting light bounces. But unless the surface is also emitting light, all lighting in the scene is from bounces, even of everything in the scene is diffuse.

robbrown451 7y ago
Pretty sure I'm not confused about it, although it appears I use the word "bounce" a bit differently than you. Specular reflection and diffuse reflection are very different things, at least on typical reflective objects (including water and glass and black things, which don't have significant amounts of diffuse reflection). Here's one of many things I've written on it (and my experiments related to specularity and such go back to the early 80s) https://www.quora.com/Why-does-snow-appear-white-in-colour-while-water-is-transparent-colourless-1/answer/Rob-Brown-13 https://www.quora.com/Why-does-snow-appear-white-in-colour-w...
- magicalhippo 7y ago
  If you come from a ray/path tracing background, it's bounces all the way.