Introduction

This article presents a survey of popular shading models used in 3D computer graphics. Each model is discussed on the basis of an hardware-accelerated implementation that runs on typical consumer-grade graphics boards. The discussion is focused on interactive real-time applications, where - besides realism - computational costs, scalability, and easily tweakable parameters are important factors. Furthermore, an attempt is made to incorporate the strengths of some of the discussed shading models into a new one. Special attention has been paid to the aforementioned factors to make the model particularly suitable for real-time applications such as video games.

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