IMPROVED ENVIRONMENT MAPPING

The GL shader language seems to be more notorious than I expected. After a great deal of fighting against it, I was able to finally load multiple textures into the same scene, although using the same texture object rather than multiple ones. I will figure out what I was doing wrong one day! But for now, it led to some great deal of awesomeness after the part of multiple textures was dealt with. A skybox has been created around the plane as promised. So to give the whole parallax feel, the center of the skybox moves along with the camera. Everything in graphics is a trick once you figure out the details. The environment is not really a reflection of the surroundings. Rather it is rendered on the surface and it is manipulated to make the viewer feel that it is a reflection. So when you look at the render video below and feel that the plane is reflecting it’s surroundings, I have done a successful job!

I have decided against doing the cube mapping on the plane for now. The environment is a cube map though. Cube mapping will accurately reflect all the surroundings. This

makes it feel even more realistic. I might get back to this at some point but I’ve spent enough time on this shader. It’s time to try something new.