[Gnu3dkit-discuss] Re: NSOpenGL RenderKit

[Philippe C . D . Robert]

Hi,

I cc'ed the 3DKit discussion list, because I think this might be 
interesting...

On Wednesday, October 23, 2002, at 01:08  Uhr, Lyndon Tremblay wrote:
> On 2002-10-22 05:52:27 -0400 Philippe C.D. Robert 
> <address@hidden> wrote:
> > You could definitly write a SDL backend, this would be very 
> > interesting, but 2 problems would then still not be handled 
> > automatically:
> > - how would you render fonts correctly?
>
> I realize SDL does not have any knowledge of 'windowing' -- therefore 
> a SDL-based X renderer would be used. It should allow for back-art or 
> back-gps etc to work, the rastering would be implemented in SDL.

Does such a renderer exist?

> > Anyway, if you start such a beast, keep me updated! :-)
>
> I am wondering how 3DKit relates to the RenderMan standard. I have 
> been considering research on designing and implementing a hardware 
> accelerated RenderMan-compliant renderer based on OpenGL 2.0.

This is a very interesting issue. The GNU 3DKit was developed as a 
OpenGL based 3D framework only, although the idea to write it came from 
NeXT's 3DKit. Now my research interests have shifted a little and I am 
less interested in pure OpenGL based stuff. Up until recently I did not 
think of making the GNU 3DKit more generic, though. But then I started 
thinking about how the next gen 3DKit could be used to render a scene 
using different techniques (I am particularly interested in ray 
tracing, but other scanline based techniques would be interesting as 
well). My idea was to manage a scene in a scene database which could 
then be rendered by different renderers. Of course this needs much more 
thinking, but I now believe that it is worth it. This has the drawback, 
that a running version of it will be even more delayed though.

Is this really worth the effort, is anyone else interested in using 
such functionality?

-Phil
--
Philippe C.D. Robert
http://www.nice.ch/~phip