Environment mapping is a technique that simulates highly reflective surfaces without using ray tracing. In practice, environment mapping applies a special texture map that contains an image of the scene surrounding an object to the object itself. The result approximates the appearance of a reflective surface, close enough to fool the eye, without incurring any of the complex computations involved in ray tracing. Reality Factory can apply this effect to actors.
Spherical environment maps, or sphere maps, are special textures that contain an image of the scene surrounding an object, or the lighting effects around the object. Unlike cubic environment maps, sphere maps don't directly represent an object's surroundings. A sphere map is a 2D representation of the full 360-degree view of the scene surrounding of an object, as if taken through a fish-eye lens. A sphere map material must be prefixed with SM0_
Reality Factory can also produce a different kind of environment mapping effect. This effect can be activated for materials with the prefix env_ by setting the entity or INI file option EnvironmentMapping to true. To apply this effect to all materials of an actor there is an additional option called AllMaterial.