A coordinated use of hardware-provided bitplanes and rendering pipelin
es can create ray-trace quality illumination effects in real time. We
provide recursive reflections through the use of secondary viewpoints,
and present a method for using a homogeneous 2D projective image mapp
ing to extend this method for refractive surfaces. We extend the tradi
tional use of shadow volumes to provide reflected and refracted shadow
s as well as reflected and refracted lighting. A shadow blending techn
ique is demonstrated, and the shadow and lighting effects are incorpor
ated into our recursive viewpoint paradigm. Finally, we incorporate ma
terial properties including a translucency model to provide a general
framework for creating physically approximate renderings. These techni
ques are immediately applicable to areas such as 3D modelling, animati
on and interactive environments to produce more realistic images in re
al time.