Can moons/planets illuminate the night side of other planets with reflected starlight? – so all about albedos.asked by Rodrigo Figueiredo

I love this guy's thinking, and you know the short answer is right now, no. We don't necessarily do a ray trace for our lighting we have all kind of different techniques for it but with that said there are things that we're working on like real-time environment probes and these things that will – when other planets are glowing or like the moon lights up our night if you've got a clear night and you've got a really bright moon you'll be able to see a lot more.

That's because the ambient level is increased and that would be represented in our real-time cubemap updates but this isn't an actual light-bounce coming from the sun, hitting the moon, hitting the dark side of the planet. It's actually more the sun is hitting the moon which is making the moon really bright and then when you're on the planet then you've got a really bright spot in the sky that's going to up the ambient level anyways.

So actually I guess even to kind of go backwards on my answer, I guess right now yes you would get that but not in the way that it's kind of described in the question because it kind of implies there is a real ray trace reflecting off that moon and then coming down into things – it's just the fact that the ambient level is much higher.

Now could we do something crazy like a ray march to move that stuff round and get shadows coming from it and all that kind of something? Maybe, but it would definitely be something that you've got to email your local graphics programmer about – Carsten Wenzel. And he could take a look at that, but right now it will actually affect it it's just not exactly how it's explained in the question.