A good week at work this week. We’ve been working here on some exciting new lighting technology to give a) environment-based specular highlights and b) soft shadows. There exist trivial techniques for a) for spot-lights (Phong shading) and slightly less trivial techniques for a) for arbitrary environments (specular maps). There are also ways to do b) for view independant lighting (diffuse Lambertian) but not any easy ways to do a) and b) short of evaluating the lighting integral directly.
Our cunningness is based on doing the lighting integral in a clever way so it is small constant-time per vertex rather than O(n2).