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Showing posts from April, 2009

What is shader?

Shader is one of the important component of mental ray. Let me tell about it a bit. A shader is a program code fragment that computes how light interacts with objects. This was the original concept of shader in early computer graphics time and nowadays the role of shader and its meaning are expanded. In one of the common scenario in computer graphics, objects are usually represented as polygons. First, the intensity of each vertex is computed, then inside the polygon is filled by an interpolation method. This becomes more complex as the computer graphics technology developed. There were two shader development directions. One is a hardware rendering that concentrates rendering speed and interactivity. The other is a software rendering that concentrates the image quality. Nowadays graphics hardware is called GPU (Graphics Processing Unit). The early stage GPU has fixed functionalities. Because fixed functionality can be achieved more performance in practice. The implementation was based

About this blog

This blog is about mental ray, a rendering software. What is mental ray? Mental ray is a rendering software produced by a German company (a subsidiary company of NVidia. (2009)) mental images, GmbH . Several DCC (Digital Contents Creation) software, e.g., Maya, 3dsMax, Softimage XSI, employ mental ray as one of a renderer. Mental ray is also used in some CAD software, like Solidworks. The famous usage is special effect of some movies, such as StarWars, Matrix II/III, recently one is The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. http://www.mentalimages.com/products/mental-ray.html http://www.mentalimages.com/gallery/motion-pictures.html The main sales point of mental ray is a lot of features and you can do a lot of things. But on the other hand, we can do everything means sometimes we can do nothing. It is complex and thus difficult. Especially the customization ability of shaders is flexible, but it is a bit hard for me. However, usually it is suffice to use the provided shaders. One of my Ital