Is this "cube map" able to handle reflection of any kind of face such as sphere face? This approach seems to treat the 6 'views' as textures, and rendering the sphere will be similar to render a sphere with texture.
keenan
I'm not 100% sure what you mean here, but cube mapping does not depend on the type of geometry being rendered. The texture cube does not actually encode any geometry: it encodes the color "at infinity" from the perspective of the center of the cube.
Note that it is also just an approximation: the view from the object center is not (in general) the same as the view from the point where the light hits the surface. But for distant reflections (like clouds in the sky), this deviation makes very little difference.
Is this "cube map" able to handle reflection of any kind of face such as sphere face? This approach seems to treat the 6 'views' as textures, and rendering the sphere will be similar to render a sphere with texture.
I'm not 100% sure what you mean here, but cube mapping does not depend on the type of geometry being rendered. The texture cube does not actually encode any geometry: it encodes the color "at infinity" from the perspective of the center of the cube.
Note that it is also just an approximation: the view from the object center is not (in general) the same as the view from the point where the light hits the surface. But for distant reflections (like clouds in the sky), this deviation makes very little difference.