Abstract: This paper describes a new architecture for generat ing smoothly shaded two dimensional images of volume data. This architecture fits into an image synthesis pipeline and uses only simple arithmetic operations and a look-up table to generate two dimensional images in real time. The shading algorithm is an extension of the grey-level gradient algorithm for shading volume data. The shading technique produces smooth images for voxelized geometrical data and sampled volume data. Image synthesis from volume data in real time is an important technique in visualization and graphics systems.