What is image sampling?

…When working with render engines such as mental ray there are certain core…fundamentals regarding the technology at work that we are, or…could more specifically say, our work will benefit from understanding.…We have already looked a little bit in chapter three at the workings of…Mental Rays GI systems.…In this particular video though,…we want to spend a few minutes focusing on another key area of mental ray.…This being its Image Sampling engines.…The question that we will start with then is just what is Image Sampling?…Well, when we talk about the Image Sampling process,…we are in reality talking about the Raytrace Rendering process itself.…

You see, in order to collect all of the relevant information required from…a scene such as the shape of geometric surfaces,…the properties of applied materials, lighting and shadow information and so on.…Well, our render engine needs to somehow sample the scene so…that it can determine what color values should be drawn in each of…the pixels that will make up our final rendered image.…