RAT Shader Library

The Collections

MTOR ships with a standard set of shaders that you can choose to use in your own productions. Shaders are programs, written in the RenderMan Shading Language, that describe and define how a surface will look under certain conditions. Shaders can describe more than surfaces. There are four main types of shaders: surface shaders, displacement shaders, light shaders, and volume shaders.  

The shaders packaged with RAT range from simple surface shaders, like a basic plastic, to more sophisticated shaders created for special purposes and/or effects. These core shaders are the preferred method for shading objects for many routine tasks. For instance, the light shader mtorSpotLight is often sufficient for many lighting setups, when additional abilities are required new light shaders can be written or generated interactively.

These collections should be enough to get you started, but you'll certainly want to develop your own shaders at some point. You can add new blood to your shader arsenal in several ways: by writing your own custom shaders, creating them interactively with Slim, or gathering them from third-party internet repositories.

The Shaders

Here's a palette containing the collection of standard shaders.
The user interface to standard shaders can be enhanced with an associated .sli file.