Rapid adoption
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In late 1983 I wrote a language to allow me to
execute arbitrary shading and texturing programs.
For each pixel of an image,
the language took in surface position and normal as well as material id,
ran a shading, lighting and texturing program, and output color.
As far as I've been able to determine, this was the first shader language in existence
(as my grandmother would have said, who knew?).
I treated normal perturbation, local variations in specularity, nonisotropic reflection models, shading, lighting, etc. as just different forms of procedural texture - I didn't see any reason to make a big distinction between them. I presented this work first at a course in SIGGRAPH 84, and then as a paper in SIGGRAPH 85. Because the techniques were so simple, they quickly got adopted throughout the industry. By around 1988 noise-based shaders where de rigeur in commercial software. I didn't patent. As my grandmother would have said... |