An Adaptive Method for Shader Simplification

Abstract

Programmable shader is a powerful tool to describe objects' appearances in the realm of computer graphics. However, executing shaders takes up much time during rendering and can easily go beyond the computer hardware capability. We present a novel method to simplify both programmable shaders based on Render Man Shading Language and geometries for reducing rendering time with little quality loss. Given a level, we use progressive mesh to simplify geometries adaptively to obtain an appropriate representation, besides, shaders can also be automatically simplified by applying our simplification rules. To our knowledge, research on geometry level of detail often combines texture level of detail, whereas our approach is the first to implement the combination of geometry level of detail and shader level of detail.