Lighting: Shadows and Recursion

This lecture covers the concepts of multiple light sources and the linear superposition of light contributions, addressing shadow issues caused by floating point errors and providing solutions to avoid self-shadowing. It also explains the process of sending shadow rays from intersection points to light sources, discarding contributions if blocked by objects. The lecture delves into recursive ray tracing, where incoming rays are reflected and/or refracted at surface normals, and child rays are traced recursively to determine the final color based on material properties. Additionally, it discusses lighting computations involving ambient, diffuse, specular, shadows, and reflections, concluding with an overview of the ray tracing pipeline for implementing a basic ray tracer.