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The shader assembly language in Direct3D 8 and 9 is the main programming language for vertex and pixel shaders in Shader Model 1.0/1.1, 2.0, and 3.0. It is a direct representation of the intermediate shader bytecode which is passed to the graphics driver for execution.
Originally, this functionality was achieved by writing shaders in ARB assembly language – a complex and unintuitive task. The OpenGL ARB created the OpenGL Shading Language to provide a more intuitive method for programming the graphics processing unit while maintaining the open standards advantage that has driven OpenGL throughout its history.
This shader works by replacing all light areas of the image with white, and all dark areas with a brightly colored texture. In computer graphics, a shader is a computer program that calculates the appropriate levels of light, darkness, and color during the rendering of a 3D scene—a process known as shading.
To the right is an image showing a simple example of a path of rays recursively generated from the camera (or eye) to the light source using the above algorithm. A diffuse surface reflects light in all directions. First, a ray is created at an eyepoint and traced through a pixel and into the scene, where it hits a diffuse surface.
Older and more basic 3D rasterization implementations did not support shaders, and used simple shading techniques such as flat shading (lighting is computed once for each triangle, which is then rendered entirely in one color), Gouraud shading (lighting is computed using normal vectors defined at vertices and then colors are interpolated across ...
Cg (short for C for Graphics) and High-Level Shader Language (HLSL) are two names given to a high-level shading language developed by Nvidia and Microsoft for programming shaders. Cg/HLSL is based on the C programming language and although they share the same core syntax, some features of C were modified and new data types were added to make Cg ...
The most important shader units are vertex shaders, geometry shaders, and pixel shaders. The Unified Shader has been introduced to take full advantage of all units. This gives a single large pool of shader units. As required, the pool is divided into different groups of shaders. A strict separation between the shader types is therefore no ...
A simple example of shading is texture mapping, which uses an image to specify the diffuse color at each point on a surface, giving it more apparent detail. Some shading techniques include: Bump mapping : Invented by Jim Blinn , a normal-perturbation technique used to simulate wrinkled surfaces.