Hi Roland,
I'm not sure what kind of standard you're looking for. The LDConfig file appears to specify the material primarily through enumerations, which I think is good - standardizing the lighting model for LDraw would IMO be really problematic. (Either the lighting model would be extremely complex and every non-shader-based renderer would have to ignore the spec, or the lighting standard would be something that could be implemented in fixed function and we'd miss out on a lot of really good effects.)
In terms of actual rendering, when I did my first materials experiment I found that having a fresnel term to limit the specular hilites really helped to differentiate plastic and metal. In the experiment I used cube maps for both reflections and specularity; the fresnel term makes the plastic more reflective "on edge" than when viewed "straight on" - which makes the material not just look like a dull mirror.
(The code I used came straight from GPU gems chapter 19 - Schlick's fresnel approximation is what everyone uses.)
http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems..._ch19.html
Cheers
Ben
I'm not sure what kind of standard you're looking for. The LDConfig file appears to specify the material primarily through enumerations, which I think is good - standardizing the lighting model for LDraw would IMO be really problematic. (Either the lighting model would be extremely complex and every non-shader-based renderer would have to ignore the spec, or the lighting standard would be something that could be implemented in fixed function and we'd miss out on a lot of really good effects.)
In terms of actual rendering, when I did my first materials experiment I found that having a fresnel term to limit the specular hilites really helped to differentiate plastic and metal. In the experiment I used cube maps for both reflections and specularity; the fresnel term makes the plastic more reflective "on edge" than when viewed "straight on" - which makes the material not just look like a dull mirror.
(The code I used came straight from GPU gems chapter 19 - Schlick's fresnel approximation is what everyone uses.)
http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems..._ch19.html
Cheers
Ben