[Gnu3dkit-discuss] Re: NSOpenGL RenderKit

[Lyndon Tremblay]

On 2002-10-23 06:44:32 -0400 Philippe C.D. Robert <address@hidden> 
wrote:

> 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?

If a new server was written using the existing X11 backend server codebase for
window management, using SDL contexts and input events. The existing X11 
rasterizing functions would be garnished for SDL.

Hearing about Frederic's GSXView, the SDL method seems a bit wasteful now...

> > > 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.

I start to wonder if a RenderMan-compliant scene graph is worth it.
There are no open source renderers using the Reyes method that I know of, but 
one built using OpenGL 2.0 (nVidia Cg preliminarily) should be fairly straight 
forward. It would be useful to have a RenderMan compliant renderer with 
GNUstep support, for distribution, bundles, etc.

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

--Lyndon