Cube mapping

In computer graphics, cube mapping is a method of environment mapping that uses the six faces of a cube as the map shape. The environment is projected onto the sides of a cube and stored as six square textures, or unfolded into six regions of a single texture. The cube map is generated by first rendering the scene six times from a viewpoint, with the views defined by a 90 degree view frustum representing each cube face.

In the majority of cases, cube mapping is preferred over the older method of sphere mapping because it eliminates many of the problems that are inherent in sphere mapping such as image distortion, viewpoint dependency, and computational inefficiency. Also, cube mapping provides a much larger capacity to support real-time rendering of reflections relative to sphere mapping because the combination of inefficiency and viewpoint dependency severely limits the ability of sphere mapping to be applied when there is a consistently changing viewpoint.

Cube mapping was first proposed in 1986 by Ned Greene in his paper “Environment Mapping and Other Applications of World Projections”, ten years after environment mapping was first put forward by Jim Blinn and Martin Newell. However, hardware limitations on the ability to access six texture images simultaneously made it infeasible to implement cube mapping without further technological developments. This problem was remedied in 1999 with the release of the Nvidia GeForce 256. Nvidia touted cube mapping in hardware as “a breakthrough image quality feature of GeForce 256 that ... will allow developers to create accurate, real-time reflections. Accelerated in hardware, cube environment mapping will free up the creativity of developers to use reflections and specular lighting effects to create interesting, immersive environments.” Today, cube mapping is still used in a variety of graphical applications as a favored method of environment mapping.

Cube mapping is preferred over other methods of environment mapping because of its relative simplicity. Also, cube mapping produces results that are similar to those obtained by ray tracing, but is much more computationally efficient – the moderate reduction in quality is compensated for by large gains in efficiency.

...
Wikipedia