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Ambient Occlusion is a shading technique used to calculate how exposed each point in a scene is to ambient lighting. It helps to add realism by accentuating the depth and cavities in the graphics.

Shadow mapping is a technique that uses textures (shadow maps) to record the distance from light sources to surfaces, and then uses this information to determine shadows in the scene.

Gouraud shading is a method where vertex colors are calculated using a light reflection model and then interpolated across the polygon's surface, producing a gradient effect.

A specular map is a texture used to define the specular reflectivity and glossiness of a surface, allowing certain parts to appear shinier than others.

Environment mapping is a shading technique to simulate reflective surfaces by rendering an image of the environment onto the surface, often used for metallic and glassy appearances.

The Blinn-Phong model is an enhancement of Phong shading that uses halfway vectors between the view and light directions to reduce computational complexity for specular highlights.

Ray tracing is a rendering technique for generating images by simulating the way rays of light interact with objects in the scene, often producing highly realistic graphics.

Diffuse reflection refers to the way light scatters when hitting a rough surface, resulting in a soft and uniform illumination that doesn't reflect an image.

Phong shading is a technique that interpolates surface normals across rasterized polygons and computes pixel colors based on a reflection model. It's used to create realistic highlights on 3D models in games.

Flat shading is a simple lighting technique where one color is calculated for each polygon, without any gradient or interpolation across the surface.

Specular reflection depicts the mirror-like reflection of light from a surface, where the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection. This effect creates highlights and shiny spots.

Displacement mapping is a technique that uses a height map to alter the vertices of a surface geometry, creating more accurate shadows, silhouettes, and textures.

Light attenuation determines the decrease in light intensity as the distance from the light source increases, often modeled in shaders by a quadratic decay.

Normal mapping is a technique to simulate high-resolution textures on a low-polygon surface by perturbing the normal vectors with a texture map, giving the illusion of complex detail.