The structure of a shader

Abstract

As we’ll see in the course of this book, shaders in mental ray are used throughout the rendering process and for very different purposes. For most shader types, there is a standard structure for the inputs and outputs that you can rely on when you are writing a new shader. To begin to make sense of that structure, we’ll start with a really simple idea for a shader and expand what it can do until we arrive at one of the basic structures for shaders in mental ray.