Rendering
Algorithms that turn scene data into images.
Rendering algorithms compute how geometry, lights, cameras, and surfaces become pixels on a screen or image.
Rasterization
Converts geometric shapes into pixels on a screen.
Ray Tracing
Renders images by tracing rays from the camera into a scene.
Path Tracing
Simulates light transport by sampling random paths through a scene.
Z-Buffering
Keeps the closest visible fragment for each pixel.
Ambient Occlusion
Darkens areas where nearby geometry blocks ambient light.
Marching Cubes
Extracts a triangle surface from a 3D scalar field.
Photon Mapping
Simulates global illumination by tracing photons from light sources.
Ray Marching
Renders by stepping along rays until they hit or pass through scene features.
Scanline Rendering
Renders polygons row by row across the image.
Screen Space Ambient Occlusion
Approximates ambient occlusion from the visible depth buffer.
Shadow Mapping
Creates shadows by comparing camera pixels with depth from the light's view.
Sphere Tracing
Ray marches signed distance fields using safe distance steps.
Whitted Ray Tracing
Traces primary, reflection, and refraction rays for sharp recursive lighting effects.
Deferred Shading
Separates geometry rendering from lighting by first storing surface data in screen-space buffers.
Forward Rendering
Shades objects as they are drawn directly into the final image.
Tiled Rendering
Divides the screen into tiles so each tile can process only nearby or relevant lights.
Clustered Shading
Groups screen space and depth into clusters so lights are culled in three dimensions.
Screen Space Reflections
Approximates reflections by ray marching through already rendered screen-space depth.
Temporal Anti-Aliasing
Reduces aliasing by accumulating jittered samples across frames.
FXAA
Smooths jagged image edges with a fast post-process filter.
Next Event Estimation
Reduces path tracing noise by sampling direct light sources at each shading point.
MSAA
Reduces geometric aliasing by sampling coverage multiple times per pixel.
ReSTIR Sampling
Reuses light samples with reservoir sampling to improve direct lighting estimates.
Russian Roulette Path Termination
Randomly terminates low-contribution light paths while preserving an unbiased estimator.
Importance Sampling BRDF
Samples BRDF directions with a matching PDF so Monte Carlo paths spend more work on likely scattering directions.
BVH Traversal
Tests rays against a hierarchy of bounding volumes before testing contained geometry.
Mipmapping
Samples prefiltered texture levels so distant surfaces avoid aliasing and cache waste.
Normal Mapping
Adds lighting detail by perturbing shading normals from a texture instead of changing geometry.
Parallax Occlusion Mapping
Offsets texture coordinates by ray-marching through a height field on the surface.
Shadow Volumes
Creates extruded volumes from occluders to identify pixels in shadow.
Variance Shadow Maps
Stores depth moments so shadow maps can be filtered with probabilistic bounds.
Cook-Torrance Shading
Models specular reflection using microfacet surface behavior.
Phong Shading
Computes local lighting with ambient, diffuse, and specular terms per fragment.
Blinn-Phong Shading
Approximates specular highlights with a halfway vector between light and view directions.
Tone Mapping
Maps high-dynamic-range color values into a displayable range.
SVGF Denoising
SVGF Denoising computes visibility, shading, filtering, or lighting for images.
Irradiance Caching
Irradiance Caching computes visibility, shading, filtering, or lighting for images.
Light Mapping
Light Mapping computes visibility, shading, filtering, or lighting for images.
Light Propagation Volumes
Light Propagation Volumes computes visibility, shading, filtering, or lighting for images.
Cascaded Shadow Maps
Cascaded Shadow Maps computes visibility, shading, filtering, or lighting for images.
Percentage-Closer Filtering
Percentage-Closer Filtering computes visibility, shading, filtering, or lighting for images.
Physically Based Shading
Physically Based Shading computes visibility, shading, filtering, or lighting for images.
Oren-Nayar Shading
Oren-Nayar Shading computes visibility, shading, filtering, or lighting for images.
Subsurface Scattering Approximation
Subsurface Scattering Approximation computes visibility, shading, filtering, or lighting for images.
Depth Peeling
Depth Peeling addresses order-independent transparency by rendering successive depth layers from front to back.
Order-Independent Transparency
Renders transparent fragments without requiring a single global depth-sorted draw order.