Shaders and GPU

A shader is a program that renders 3d material. It allows you to enhance how light reflects off 3d surfaces and objects also what is reflected or refracted as these are the 3 possible outcomes. GPU’s are used to calcute the algorithum for a shader but it used to be done by CPU’s. It’s better now as it takes much less time to calculate and render the product.

1.  A vertex shaders job is to change values of data that defines where a verticies is in a 3d enviroment to come out as a different colour, texture or position.
2. A pixel shaders job is to calculate effects per pixel. Depending on screen resolution you can get more than 2 million pixels in a frame and when the frame rate runs at 60 frames per second this creates an extremely high amount of pixels to be rendered.
3. A geometry shaders job is to add and remove verticies from the vertex shader.  

CGI Timeline

19601960 – William Fetter of Boeing coins the term “computer graphics” for his human factors cockpit drawings

1961 – Spacewars, 1st video game, developed by Steve Russell at MIT for the PDP-1

1962/63 – Edward Zajac produced one of the first computer generated films at Bell Labs

1963 – Sketchpad developed beginning in 1961 by Ivan Sutherland at MIT is unveiled

1963 – Mouse invented by Doug Englebart of SRI

1964 – The BASIC programming language developed by Kurtz and Kemeny

1964 – Ruth Weiss introduces drawing software that performs hidden line elimination

 

 

Paul Debevec

Paul Debevec is recognised in the followers stage of CGI aquiring degrees in Math and Computer Engineering at the University of Michigan in 1992 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science at UC Berkeley in 1996. He created a 3D model of a chevette from 2 dimensional images  and also other 3D work with images in sequences like the scenes in matrix where the camera appeared to fly around the characters to create a 3D illusion when played in order. as a line of cameras taking photos within quick succession.

 

Photogrammetric Modeling is the name of a process of creating 3D models from photographs and he used it in the design of photorealistic architecture. He created a fly by 3d model of the berkeley building for his film the campanille movie which was presented