Surface Decoration:  Environment Mapping


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Make an all-around map of a surrounding scenery,

-- either on a cube

-- or on a sphere


Access this map via a direction vector, computed from
the viewing direction and the surface normal.



Environment maps yields cheap reflections


Reflections are only based on surface normal,
i.e., the object as infinitesimally small
compared to the environment


This simplification is hard to notice on non-flat objects