light transport: buses, trams and low capacity rail

Metropolis light transport: art deco buses, trams and low capacity rail. gecko dancing robot optional but recommended

BRDF: Bordigist Red Dissenter Faction, a minor left communist group with six members, who formally disbanded in 1995

baking: very important for scenes containing bread

retopology: the academic study of experimenting with a receptive role in gay sex, but finding it disappointing

shader: a small program designed to run in parallel, which takes in vertex data and uses it to say cruel things to your enemies

triangle: a musical instrument

keyframe: a small gilded rectangle for displaying encryption data

deferred rendering: when you forget to render your project before the deadline

rigging: used to swing aboard an adjacent animation studio

NURBS: not an acronym, just stated with the proper emphasis

raymarching: a variant of raytracing usually seen at parades and sporting events

chromatic aberration: the offspring of a red dragon and a mind flayer

PBR: parboiled rice, used primarily as a religious offering in the context of computer graphics

SDF: Self Defence Force. while, by treaty, GPUs tend to possess unspectacular armed forces, careful negotiation is important when sending data into GPU land to prevent counterinvasion of the PCIe bus

scene: a semi-ritualistic practice in which geometric primitives are dressed up in revealing shaders, tied up in a bounding volume hierarchy, and hit repeatedly with rays. not to be confused with 'emo'

allocator: an adorable fusion of feline and saurian, commonly sighted in the foothills of Vulkan and northern DirectX 12

splatting: see "bukkake"

gaussian splatting: an esoteric type of scene originating at BDSM clubs in Göttingen; the researchers believe the association with Carl Friedrich Gauss is apocryphal, but what if, you know?

polar coordinates: once commonly seen in computer graphics, climate change has made this species severely endangered. conservation efforts are underway

SSS: materials such as skin and wax do not look believable unless you hiss like a snake while programming. this technique was discovered by accident in the mid 2000s as a fortuitous byproduct of wiring up an adder

visibility buffer: contains transgender people on March 31 of each year

amd: common misspelling of 'and'

nvidia: common abbreviation for 'invidious'

stanford bunny, stanford dragon, stanford armadillo: widely beloved furry OCs which get a lot of fanart from graphics programmers

softbody: take estrogen and you will be rewarded =)

supplemental: a guide to shaders

vertex shader: a waterproof, breathable type of shader used to render outdoor clothing

fragment shader: used by witches to establish complex metafictional games

pixel shader: pseudonym used by fragment shaders rendering genre fiction

geometry shader: after widespread condemnation of the geometry shader's untoward remarks about the GPU pipeline put an end to its career in graphics, it has sadly fallen into the sordid world of right-wing podcasts and tabloid columns

hull shader: a niche type of shader, primarily used by residents of yorkshire

domain shader: rejected proposal to speed up internet address resolution with GPUs

compute shader: the swiss army knife of shaders. literally; it has a corkscrew and stuff

mesh shader: mostly used for rendering nightclubs

tensor shader: shader which contains covariant and contravariant components in a curved space

ray generation shader: sorts rays into categories like 'millennial', 'zoomer' and 'gen alpha' for appropriately targeted mockery

closest hit shader: uses the full power of massively parallel computing to look up the nearest weed stash