Shader space navigator: A turbo for an intuitive and effective shading process

Abstract

In this paper, we first point out difficulties faced by CG artists in the shading process: (1) a lot of technical details on shaders required, (2) long rendering time, and (3) repeated cumbersome trial-and-errors. To make them overcome such difficulties, we propose Shader Space Navigator, a system that efficiently searches for shaders similar to a given query shader. With Shader Space Navigator, CG artists find quality shaders from the database that are very close to the final result shader, and thus complete the shading process easily by slightly tuning some attributes of those shaders. As a result, the CG artists can create their final shaders in an intuitive and efficient way thereby avoiding a large number of time-consuming rendering processes.