A shader is a miniature computer program that controls the behavior of the mental rayŽ rendering software during, or immediately after (in the case of output shaders), the rendering process. Some shaders are invoked by mental ray to compute the color values of pixels. Other shaders can displace or create geometry on the fly.
There are many different types of shaders: surface, environment, volume, shadow, photon, light, lens, texture, and so on. They are described in The Shader Library.
To create customized or detailed effects, you have to know how to connect shaders to one another, whether you are working in the render tree or simply mapping shaders together via their connection icons. For information about shader input and outputs, see Shader Input and Output Ports.
MetaShaders
MetaShaders are multi-implementation shaders that can support several renderers simultaneously. Many of the shaders in Softimage’s shader library are MetaShaders, supporting both Softimage’s built-in mental ray renderer and Cg renderers.
For information about how to recognize MetaShaders in the render tree, see MetaShaders in the Render Tree.
For information about creating your own MetaShaders, see the SDK Guide.
Topics
• Applying and Editing Shaders
• Saving and Loading Shader Presets
Autodesk Softimage v.7.5