In Review
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## In Review

In this tutorial, you have learned the following:

- Specular lighting represents direct, mirror-like reflections from a surface. Specular highlights are mirror-like reflections directly from a light source. Adding weak specular highlights to even rough surfaces can increase visual realism.

- The microfacet model of specular reflection means that, for a given surface area, there are many mirror-like surfaces. Each microfacet reflects perfectly in its direction. The average of the microfacets

- The Phong and Blinn models of specular reflection use a power function based on how close the viewer is to perfect reflection to approximate a microfacet distribution.

- A Gaussian statistical distribution can be used to more accurately model the distributions of microfacets on a surface.

### Further Study

Try doing these things with the given programs.

- Change the shaders to use the diffuse color as the specular color. You may need to drop the specular color somewhat to keep from over-brightening the scene. How this all looks will be particularly evident with the colored cylinder.

### Further Research

As you might guess, this is far from the end on specular reflections and specular highlights. Accurately modelling specular reflection is very difficult; doing so while maintaining high performance is even moreso.

If you are interested in more accurate models of specular highlights, there is the Beckmann distribution. This is a particular statistical distribution of microfacets that is more physically based than a Gaussian distribution. It may or may not be a bit more computationally expensive than Gaussian; Beckmann lacks the inverse cosine, but has more other math to it. The two do have a roughness factor that has the same range, (0, 1], and the roughness has the same general meaning in both distributions.

If you want to go even farther, investigate the Cook-Torrance model of specular reflection. It incorporates several terms. It uses a statistical distribution to determine the number of microfacets oriented in a direction. This distribution can be Gaussian, Beckmann, or some other distribution. It modifies this result based on a geometric component that models microfacet self-shadowing and the possibility for multiple interreflections among a microfaceted surface. And it adds a term to compensate for the Fresnel effect: an effect where specular reflection from a surface is more intense when viewed edge-on than directly top-down.

### GLSL Functions of Note

`vec reflect(` | vec I,
| vec N`)`;

Computes the vector that would be reflected across the normal `N` from an incident vector `I`. The vector result will be normalized if the input vectors are normalized. Note that `I` vector is the vector towards the surface.

`vec pow(` | vec X,
| vec Y`)`;

Raises `X` to the power of `Y`, component-wise. If a component of `X` is less than 0, then the resulting value is undefined. If `X` is exactly zero, and `Y` is less than or equal to 0, then the resulting value is undefined.

`vec acos(` | vec X`)`;

Returns the inverse cosine of `X`, component-wise. This returns the angle in radians, which is on the range [0, π]. If any component of `X` is outside of the [-1, 1] range, then that component of the result will be undefined. This is because the cosine of a value is always on [-1, 1], so the inverse-cosine function cannot take values outside of this range.

`vec exp(` | vec exponent`)`;

Returns the value of eexponent, component-wise.

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