No more texels; no more facets: Emerging trends in GPU procedural shading
Stefan Gustavson · 2013
Procedural textures have long been a staple of off-line rendering, and impressive creativeresults havebeen accomplished by using procedural methods to their advantage. As GPU speeds and computational capabilities continue to increase, procedural texturing will likely become a useful tool also for real time rendering. In fact, it is already possible to generate procedural patterns of considerable complexity at real time frame rates on a modern GPU. Even on current (2013) low-end and mobile GPUs, the programmable shading system offers considerable processing power that often remains largely unused. Such untapped resources could be used for procedural patterns and procedural geometry computed entirely on the GPU. This article presents the state of the art in the field. Most of this is yet to be implemented in commercial projects like games, VR and visualization applications. Code for the shader examples in this article is available under permissive open source licenses or as public domain software and is collected on the address: http://www.itn.liu.se/˜stegu76/sigrad13