With profound thanks to a server that behaves predictably to code, the odd errors that have for some time been appearing on the Virtual Dictionary results pages have been found and permanently removed. The dictionary results have also been tidied up slightly.

Latest Term: Specular Pass

A specular pass, usually known as a highlight pass, is one possible layer of a multi-layered render pass. It is a specialised pass, intended to heighten an earlier pass, and so is never the first pass of the sequence.

It isolates the specular highlights of the objects in the scene, which is where the name originates. This is done by removing all ambient lights, and replacing all textures or colkours with pure black. This means the only points of interest in the scene will be the highlights.

This is also why it is much more efficient to do the highlight, or specular pass as a separarte render layer – you would need to disable all the calculations carried out by the first render, so it is more efficient to re-render without any of those calculations in the first place, for this layer.

Specular highlights add a great deal of realism to a scene, at the cost of a full secondary render, so at this current time, they are not used for rendering real-time scenes, as their usage would cut the frames per second in half.

As with all multi-render passes however, their use becomes more appealing as the base frame rate increases past the eye's visual ability to follow.

See Also: Frame Rate, Render Pass, Beauty Pass, Reflection Pass, Shadow Pass, Depth Pass, Lighting Pass, Depth Pass, LOD

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Other recent entries:

Highlight Pass

Colour Pass

Diffuse Pass

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