Important Materials Theory - Photographic Rendering with V-Ray for SketchUp - page 262

What we have accomplished?
Now you may be asking: is all of this physics information really important in the final
analysis of material creation? And the answer, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is yes.
The adage he who does not know where he has come from, cannot know where he
is going would apply perfectly here.
You see whenever we take a photograph, all of these complex interactions between
light and matter are already at work and so produce the scene that we see before us.
In order to create a photographic-looking render of an environment, we will of course
need to recreate, at least to a reasonable degree, the manner in which these light and
solid matter interactions take place.
Of course, the programmers at Chaos Group have taken care of huge chunks of
this by creating lighting and material tools that do most of this work for us. We can,
however, enhance the work they have done (and so of course, improve the final res-
ults of our own rendered images) by taking the time to understand the workings not
only of the tools found in V-Ray, but also the workings of the world around us that
those tools help us recreate.
Note
Certainly, the importance of understanding and so accurately recreating color and
other material properties can be seen in the fact that many interior designers and
architects are going to want the work they have put into their designs correctly
represented in the renders and marketing materials that we produce for them. If
we don't understand at least the basics of the theory touched on in this chapter,
then the chances of us getting things right in this area are naturally going to be
greatly reduced.