Environment mapping

In computer graphics, environment mapping, or reflection mapping, is an efficient image-based lighting technique for approximating the appearance of a reflective surface by means of a precomputed texture image. The texture is used to store the image of the distant environment surrounding the rendered object.

Several ways of storing the surrounding environment are employed. The first technique was sphere mapping, in which a single texture contains the image of the surroundings as reflected on a mirror ball. It has been almost entirely surpassed by cube mapping, in which the environment is projected onto the six faces of a cube and stored as six square textures or unfolded into six square regions of a single texture. Other projections that have some superior mathematical or computational properties include the paraboloid mapping, the pyramid mapping, the octahedron mapping, and the HEALPix mapping.

The reflection mapping approach is more efficient than the classical ray tracing approach of computing the exact reflection by tracing a ray and following its optical path. The reflection color used in the shading computation at a pixel is determined by calculating the reflection vector at the point on the object and mapping it to the texel in the environment map. This technique often produces results that are superficially similar to those generated by raytracing, but is less computationally expensive since the radiance value of the reflection comes from calculating the angles of incidence and reflection, followed by a texture lookup, rather than followed by tracing a ray against the scene geometry and computing the radiance of the ray, simplifying the GPU workload.

However, in most circumstances a mapped reflection is only an approximation of the real reflection. Environment mapping relies on two assumptions that are seldom satisfied:

1) All radiance incident upon the object being shaded comes from an infinite distance. When this is not the case the reflection of nearby geometry appears in the wrong place on the reflected object. When this is the case, no parallax is seen in the reflection.

...
Wikipedia