Ray-Based Rendering Generic Concepts and Terminologies
Published:
(work in progress…)
Shaders
Unlike the rasterization pipeline, the ray tracing-based algorithms has five types of shaders (generally). The computational expensive pixel shader in rasterization could be equivalent of closest-hit shader. The ray tracing-based pipeline’s shaders are more or less 3D graphics API agnostic. The five shaders are as follows:
- The
ray generationshader defines how the ray tracing should start. It runs once per algorithm (per pass) - The
Intersectionshader/s define ray-object (aka. geometry) intersection. The shader is reusable - The
miss shader/sdefine the behavior when the ray miss hitting any geometry in the scene - The
closest hitshader/s run once per ray and shade the final hits - The
any-hitshader/s run once per hit and determine the transparency
The miss, closest hit, and any hit define the behavior of ray/s and may behave differently between primary, shadow, and indirect rays.