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- >From atc@ut-sally.UUCP Tue Feb 2 01:03:33 1988
- Path: leah!uwmcsd1!ig!agate!ucbvax!husc6!ut-sally!atc
- From: atc@ut-sally.UUCP (Alvin T. Campbell III)
- Newsgroups: comp.graphics
- Subject: Re: silver color
- Message-ID: <10287@ut-sally.UUCP>
- Date: 2 Feb 88 06:03:33 GMT
- References: <2679@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
- Reply-To: atc@ut-sally.UUCP (Alvin T. Campbell III)
- Organization: U. Texas CS Dept., Austin, Texas
- Lines: 55
-
- In article <2679@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> tada@athena.mit.edu (Ivan Tadayoff)
- writes:
- >
- >Does anyone know what values of RGB to use to make a nice looking silver?
- >(as in a metallic object?) I've tried a variety of combinations and none
- >of them seem very pleasing.
- >
- >While on the subject, does anyone know a good book on how to color ray-
- >tracing views? For example, how much does a light ray change when it
- >reflects off a metallic sphere?
- >
- >Thanks in advance for any help.
-
- You are attempting to do something very difficult. Metallic
- reflection can not be done very accurately using only an RGB triple
- to model reflective properties.
-
- The most common shading model in graphics, developed at the
- University of Utah, assumes that the diffuse color is dependent on the
- light source color and the object color, but the specular color
- is dependent only upon the light color. This is a reasonable
- approximation for plastic, but not for metal. Most of the perceived
- color of metal is from a specular component dependent on the light
- and the surface properties.
-
- A reference which gives a starting point on how to do metallic
- shading is the following:
-
- Cook, Robert L., and Kenneth E. Torrance, "A Reflectance Model
- for Computer Graphics", Computer Graphics (Proceedings of
- SIGGRAPH '81) v. 15, no. 3, (August 1981), pp.307-316.
-
- After digesting the material in the above reference, which will
- probably take a while, you can get reflectance spectra from
-
- Purdue University, Thermophysical Properties of Matter,
- v. 7: Thermal Radiative Properties of Metals, 1970.
-
- If all of this seems like too much work, and you just want to
- settle for an RGB triple for silver, the best you can do is probably
- the following:
-
- R = .95 G = .95 B = .95
- Diffuse Coefficient = .25
- Specular Coefficient = .75
- Specular Power = 6.0
-
- I hope this helps.
-
- --A. T. Campbell--
- Computer Graphics Lab
- Department of Computer Sciences
- University of Texas
- Austin, Texas
- atc@sally.CS.UTEXAS.EDU
-