Explain why the object you chose is a good use case for environment mapping.

The small sphere comes close to being the idea shape for an environment map: the reflection direction does primarily come from the normal direction - so the fact that we pretend everything is from the center is OK.

The cube is actually not a great example. Because the normals on a face all face the same direction, they might normally all access the same part of environment map - except for the difference in the points relative to the camera (which causes the reflection direction to change). The cube reflects something (and looks cool) - but it doesn't actually reflect the correct part of the environment. (to be clear, the sphere is only an "accurate" reflection if it was placed at the center).


Explain where you got your textures and include any attributions here.

The machine shop environment map on page 4/5 comes from the HRDI heaven web site https://polyhaven.com/a/machine_shop_02 (note: the old "hdri haven" now is part of polyhaven - I had gotten things from hdri haven). The texture is CC0