While in the final analysis, the truly important consideration regarding material creation is that, things look the way we want or need them to. There is still no denying the fact that being able to understand how real-world physics causes object surfaces to look the way they do, can go a long way towards helping us produce more realistic-looking materials and so in the end more photographic-looking final renders. One nice side effect of such insight is that we will find ourselves able (generally speaking) to create materials in a much shorter time frame than would otherwise be the case.

Because of this, we are going to spend some time in this chapter taking a look, albeit in a fairly brief manner, at some of the more applicable aspects of light and object interaction that have a bearing on our current project and hopefully in the process garner some important insights that will help us advance our skills as V-Ray render artists.