2 ms·
Yes, indeed. If you have narrow-band light sources, say a mercury vapor lamp[1], and some material that only reflects a different narrow-band spectrum, then you
by magicalhippo 3y ago
Yes, indeed. If you have narrow-band light sources, say a mercury vapor lamp[1], and some material that only reflects a different narrow-band spectrum, then you should get very little reflection while with an RGB renderer you'll get some reflection.
However as you point out, very few materials and lights are like this, hence why the approximation works well.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury-vapor_lamp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury-vapor_lamp
- zokier 3y agoyes, I suppose the 'baffling' part is partially from that theoretically there are infinitely (or nearly so) many different spectrums that produce some one specific color perception. So sort of probabilistically it could be seen as lucky that the spectrums of lights and materials align in a way that they do in real world. I wonder what are the pathological cases here. I'm imagining some setup where an object could appear variably green, yellow, or red; this could be maybe accomplished by different mixes of different red/green lasers and maybe white light. The paint might be bigger problem :)
- magicalhippo 3y agoThe eye also does a lot of work here, see color constancy[1]. BBC had a nice documentary on this back in the days, Colorful Notions[2], see the 19min mark for an experiment showing this in action. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_constancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_constancy [2]: https://vimeo.com/11932120 https://vimeo.com/11932120 (sadly poor quality, better rips can be found)