“Building block shaders” by Abram and Whitted

  • ©Gregory D. Abram and John Turner Whitted

Conference:


Type:


Title:

    Building block shaders

Session/Category Title: Lighting and Shading


Presenter(s)/Author(s):


Moderator(s):



Abstract:


    This paper describes an implementation of Cook’s “shade trees” in which shaders are described as networks of modules, building blocks, whose connections can be defined interactively.The high level interface to the shaders is a graphical editor which permits users to construct complex shaders by connecting shading elements in a network, in effect a graphical shading language. A low level interface to the shaders is also provided. In the low level interface, shading elements are programmed in a standard programming language and compiled into modules which can linked either at run time or compile time.Each link in the shading network represents a subroutine call. In essence, execution of the network is analogous to the execution of an interpreted language.

References:


    1. Abram, Gregory D., Lee Westover, and Turner WhJtted “Accelerated Rendering,” Proceedings of AusGraph ’88 (July 1988).
    2. Cool Robert L. “Shade Trees,” Computer Graphics, Vol. 18, No. 3, (July 1984), pp. 223-231.
    3. Haeberli, Paul, “ConMan: A Visual Programming Language for Interactive Graphics,” Computer Graphics, Vol. 22, No. 4, (July 1988), pp. 103-111.
    4. Hamahan, Pat, and Jim Lawson, “A Language for Shading and Lighting Calculations,” these proceedings.
    5. Nadas, Tom, and Alain Foumier, “GRAPE: An Environmerit to Build Display Processes,” Computer Graphics, Vol. 21, No. 4 (July 1987), pp. 75-84.
    6. Peachey, Daxwyn R., “Solid Texturing of Complex Surfaces,” Computer Graphics, Vol. 19, Ho. 3 (July 1985), pp. 279-286.
    7. Perlirt, Ken, “An Image Synthesizer,” Computer Graphics, Vol. 19, No. 3 (July 1985), pp. 287-296.
    8. Upson, Craig, Thomas Faulhaber, Jr., David Kamins, David Laidlaw, David Sehlegel, Jeffrey Vroom” Robert Gurwitz, and Andries van Dam, “Fhe Application Visualization System: A Computation Environment for Scientific Visualization,” IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Vol. 9, No. 4 (July 1989), pp. 30-42.
    9. Upstill, Steve, The RenderMan Companion Addison- Wesley, (Reading, Massachusetts), 1989.
    10. Verbeck, Charming, James Miehener, Andries van Dam, and David Laidlaw, “Extending PHIGS for Lighting and Shading – PHIGS+,” July 1987.
    11. Westover, Lee, “Footprint Evaluation for Volume Rendering,” these proceedings.
    12. Whirred, Turner and David Weimer, “A Software Test-bed for the Development of 3-D Raster Graphics Systems,” ACM Transactions on Graphics, Vol. 1, No. 1 (January 1982), pp. 43-58.


ACM Digital Library Publication:



Overview Page: