I seen a picture in an OpenGL book that had a Marble Vase but it looked shiny just like the real thing.Could someone explain the concept behind achieving these effects?
hmmmm, this can be ahieved by things like lighting, and environment mapping. And probably some other stuff too.
You can use enviroment maps to add specular lighting. This can be done efficent thanks to multitexturing. If you look at the marble vase do you perhaps see different shininess depending on the vase material. This can be achieved by editing the alpha values and is called Gloss mapping. A demo from ATI http://www.ati.com/na/pages/resource_cen…28Specular.html
A old work (98) by Kenny Hoff before the multitexture extension. Phonghighlighting http://www.cs.unc.edu/~hoff/projects/summer98_disney_lighting_effects/docs/phonghighlight/index.html
The whole library http://www.cs.unc.edu/~hoff/projects/summer98_disney_lighting_effects/docs/index.html
The library has code for generating the spheremap texture and can be downloaded in an archive from http://sites.netscape.net/ptrpck/hoff.htm
Pardon me if Im wrong, but I think what he is talking about is simple material lighting…