RenderMan Shading Language: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 18:45, 3 September 2006

Revision as of 20:59, 19 September 2006

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Shaders do the work by reading and writing special variables like Cs - surface color, N - normal at given point, and Ci - final surface color.

The arguments to the shaders are global parameters that are attached to objects of the model (so one metal shader can be used for different metals and so on),

and they have no return values. On the other hand functions operate by taking arguments and returning a value, and make little use fof special variables. For example the following function computes vector length looks almost like a [[Java programming language|Java]] or [[C programming language|C]] function except for using [[dot product]] operator:

float length(vector v) {

return sqrt(v . v); /* . is a [[dot product]] */