The Quest for Visual Realism

 

The appearance of many real world objects depends on its texture. The texture of an object is really the relatively fine geometry at the surface of an object. To appreciate the role surface textures play in the appearance of real world objects, consider carpet. Even when all of the fibers of a carpet are the same color the carpet does not appear as a constant color due to the interaction of the light with geometry of the fibers. Even though Java 3D is capable of modeling the geometry of the individual carpet fibers, the memory requirements and rendering performance for a room size piece of carpet modeled to such detail would make such a model useless. On the other hand, having a flat polygon of a single color does not make a convincing replacement for the carpet in the rendered scene.