Design Nomenclature / Digital Model Making
Rasterization
Also called raster rendering, scanline rendering, real-time rendering
This entry has not been translated yet and is shown in English.
Turning geometry into pixels by projecting each triangle to screen space and filling the pixels it covers, with visibility settled by a depth buffer. Cost scales with triangles and pixels, not with light paths — which is why it runs at frame rate, and why every optical effect must be faked or traced separately.
In practice
Nobody says “rasterization” in a room. They say “real-time”, or they name the engine. The word only surfaces when someone is contrasting it with ray tracing.
Not to be confused with
- Ray tracingHistorically, Whitted's 1980 method: trace one ray per pixel, recurse into the mirror and refraction directions, and fire shadow rays at point lights. It resolves specular transport and nothing else — no diffuse interreflection, and no soft shadows without extending it.
- RasterAn image stored as a grid of samples. It has no notion of what it depicts — a letterform in a raster is not a letter, it is the pixels a letter left behind. Scaling means resampling, and resampling invents data. Cost is fixed by dimensions regardless of content, which is why photographs are raster.