Phenomena

Phenomena are effects implemented as one or more cooperating shader graphs and instructions for integrating the Phenomenon into a scene. Phenomena can be used like shaders, but they have access to the scene graph and may consist of a large number of subshaders.

If all subshaders in a shader graph have Cg implementations, mental ray can collect the entire graph and all its internal connections, Phenomenon interface assignments, and constants and pass it to NVIDIA's Cg compiler for compilation to a single executable hardware shader. Only the Cg 1.2 language supports mental ray's shader graph techniques.

Languages that do not support Cg's graph feature must implement the entire phenomenon as if it were a single shader.

home

<< prev

next >>

contents