A shading language on graphics hardware
Marc Olano, Anselmo Lastra · 1998
Over the years, there have been two main branches of computer graphics image-synthesis research; one focused on interactivity, the other on image quality.Procedural shading is a powerful tool, commonly used for creating high-quality images and production animation.A key aspect of most procedural shading is the use of a shading language, which allows a high-level description of the color and shading of each surface.However, shading languages have been beyond the capabilities of the interactive graphics hardware community.We have created a parallel graphics multicomputer, PixelFlow, that can render images at 30 frames per second using a shading language.This is the first system to be able to support a shading language in real-time.In this paper, we describe some of the techniques that make this possible.