Frederik Steinmetz - The Cycles Encyclopedia

Path Tracer: This is a term used for a physically correct renderer. It stands for calculations that actually trace the path a light photon would take through a scene as opposed to scanline renderers. Cycles is a path tracer.

Shading point : This is the smallest distinguishable point on a surface. It is somewhat similar to a pixel, but on the surface of an object in 3D space, not on a flat image. Wherever a single ray hits an object, this spot is considered a shading point.

Shader : A mathematical function that describes how light will behave when interacting with an object.

Incident ray : You could also call this incoming ray. In shading, this is any ray that hits an object.

Global illumination : An object in a white room will be illuminated much more than an object in a dark room with the same light sources. This is due to light bouncing off diffuse surfaces thereby lighting the object by indirect soft light. BI renderer was not able to correctly calculate GI, therefore Cycles renderings tend to look more vivid.

Ambient Occlusion: It is kind of the opposite of global illumination, but it leads to a similar effect. In GI objects close to each other will receive less bouncing light, AO creates a grayscale map to artificially darken those areas. Therefore it will not take colors of bouncing light into account. The result is similar to GI, but less accurate.

Light sampling : The process of gathering lighting information for shading points by sending shadow rays to random light sources.

Bokeh: Bright points are shaped like disks when out of focus. In photography those discs are called bokeh.

Frequency: In image processing the sequence of high and low values in an image. A gradient has a low frequency, an image of a grid a high one.

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The Cycles Encyclopedia

Your Guide to Everything Cycles

Version 1.4

by Frederik Steinmetz & Gottfried Hofmann

Dedication

This book is dedicated to all the brave developers of Cycles who brought us the best open source render engine in the world.

And especially to Lukas Stockner, who never got tired of answering our questions as well as Ton Roosendaal for coordinating the ongoing effort that is Blender.

About the authors

Frederik Steinmetz is a true cosmopolitan who has lived in five countries to date. His interest in animals of all kinds even led him into the Philippine rain forest, where he did research for his graduation in Biology for four months. He's now living in Berlin, where - among other things - he teaches Blender at schools.