Concept
The Phong reflection model (also called Phong illumination or Phong lighting) is an empirical model of the local illumination of points on a surface designed by the computer graphics researcher Bui Tuong Phong. In 3D computer graphics, it is sometimes referred to as "Phong shading", particularly if the model is used with the interpolation method of the same name and in the context of pixel shaders or other places where a lighting calculation can be referred to as “shading”. The Phong reflection model was developed by Bui Tuong Phong at the University of Utah, who published it in his 1975 Ph.D. dissertation. It was published in conjunction with a method for interpolating the calculation for each individual pixel that is rasterized from a polygonal surface model; the interpolation technique is known as Phong shading, even when it is used with a reflection model other than Phong's. Phong's methods were considered radical at the time of their introduction, but have since become the de facto baseline shading method for many rendering applications. Phong's methods have proven popular due to their generally efficient use of computation time per rendered pixel. Phong reflection is an empirical model of local illumination. It describes the way a surface reflects light as a combination of the diffuse reflection of rough surfaces with the specular reflection of shiny surfaces. It is based on Phong's informal observation that shiny surfaces have small intense specular highlights, while dull surfaces have large highlights that fall off more gradually. The model also includes an ambient term to account for the small amount of light that is scattered about the entire scene. For each light source in the scene, components and are defined as the intensities (often as RGB values) of the specular and diffuse components of the light sources, respectively. A single term controls the ambient lighting; it is sometimes computed as a sum of contributions from all light sources.