IEnvironmentMap

Base interface for classes that compute color samples of an environment map.

An environment map uses a horizontal coordinate system with altitude and azimuth coordinates, interpreted as follows, with respect to the view direction:

Usually, environment maps are associated with some topocentric coordinate system in a 3D scene.

Environment maps are used to render background skies and to model the visual appearance of material reflectivity and gloss. For this purpose, an environment map is rasterized into a ColorCube and then encoded as a mipmapped cubemap texture, which in turn is used during rendering. Ambient lighting is computed from the smallest mipmaps, thus mimicking hemispheric sampling. If an environment map contains a single prominent light feature, it may expose it via the ILightProvider.LightAltitude, ILightProvider.LightAzimuth and ILightProvider.LightSize properties. These will be then used for diffuse lighting.

IEnvironmentMap objects act as resource handles and produce EnvironmentMapResource resource objects.