Inheritance

The previous section introduced multiple instancing, with instances that move a cube to multiple different locations in world space. This is only one of the two main purposes of instances. They also support inheritance. There are four different kinds that can be individually and independently specified in an instance: Material inheritance propagates materials down the scene hierarchy to objects that do not specify their own materials.Tagged material inheritance propagates material arrays down the scene hierarchy to objects that specify indices instead of materials. The indices select materials from the inherited material array.Parameter inheritance allows attaching arbitrary typed parameters to instances, and propagating them down the scene hierarchy in configurable ways.Flag inheritance propagates the visible, trace, shadow, caustics, and global illumination flags down the scene hierarchy.