ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Rasterization

Rasterization is like drawing a picture on tiny squares on a piece of paper. Each square is called a pixel. So, imagine you have a picture of a cute little birdie. To turn that picture into a bunch of tiny pixels, we need to tell the computer how to draw it.

First, we need to make a 3D shape of the birdie. Think of it like a clay sculpture. It has shape and depth to it. Then we need to "flatten" it onto the tiny pixel squares. This is called projection. It's like shining a light on the sculpture so it makes a shadow on the wall.

But the computer doesn't know what color to fill in each pixel. We need to give it some rules. We have to decide what color the birdie feathers are, what color its beak is, and so on. This is called shading. We use fancy math to figure out how light would bounce off each part of the birdie and how that would affect the color we see.

Finally, we take all these tiny pixel squares and put them together to make the full picture. And voila! We have a cute little birdie drawn on our computer screen.