Shading language

(Redirected from Shaders)

A shading language, in computer graphics, is a high-level programming language by which properties of a rendered material may be described. This can include arbitrarily complex descriptions of light absorption and diffusion, texture mapping, reflection and refraction, shadowing, surface displacement and post-processing effects.

An individual program or description written in such a language is often termed a shader. As the scene is being rendered, shaders are used to determine the appearance of each object.

The first commercial example of a shading language was in Pixar's Renderman Interface Specification. Later examples include the low-level pixel shaders (or fragment shaders) and vertex shaders of the DirectX and OpenGL interfaces, nVidia's Cg and the OpenGL Shading Language.