One of the most controversial topics for discussion for the past 35 years is the question of the reality of landing men on the moon. As you know, July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and his colleague Edwin Aldrin became the first humans to set foot on the natural satellite of our planet. During the mission "Apollo 11" was made a few pictures, which are clearly visible lunar module, the astronauts in spacesuits and cast their shadows.It has become a source of plausibility of endless debate, and the reason for that is unrealistically bright silhouette Aldrin when he was shielded from the sun body of the spacecraft that brought them to the moon.
Last week, NVIDIA released its own study, in which the experts have modeled the fall sunlight, its reflection and the construction of the shadow in space with the help of 3D-rendering techniques Ray-Tracing. As the hardware platform used the latest graphics processors GeForce GTX 970 and GeForce GTX 980, whose computing power has allowed to build a believable scene and to answer one of the most troubling issues of our time.
To understand this problem, NVIDIA engineers reconstructed scene as accurately as they could, based on documentary evidence preserved from that time. At that all the physical and optical properties of objects that have been included in the computational algorithm. This was necessary in order to understand how light is reflected from a variety of materials and behaves in real time. On the photo below you can compare the original image (right) and the resulting render (left).
When the team launched the NVIDIA simulation, it was found that a significant amount of light reflected from the suit Neil Armstrong effecting photographing. In other words, an additional source of light was indeed, he became the second person spacesuit lunar mission. The materials used in the manufacture of a suit for astronauts had very high reflectivity - from 80 to 90%, according to experts - because of what the suit unwittingly served as a "mirror" for the sunlight.
It is interesting that in a few weeks NVIDIA plans to release a custom demo version of the program allows you to simulate finding astronauts on the moon. On an example of such a simulation is best to see that progress in the development of building lighting in virtual environments. It is possible that such decisions in the near future we will be able to watch in animation and computer games, the benefit of the hardware components that support rendering of realistic lighting, taking into account all, even the most minor of details surrounding, already have.