Re: [Gnu3dkit-discuss] Advanced Rendering Interface

[Gerard Iglesias]

Hi,

Well, the feeling I have when reading 'Real-Time rendering' and the 
opengl 2.0 specs is that people are going to mimic more and more 
Renderman in real time.

I see the real interest in the language as basis for our native file 
format or something like that.

But on the API side I don't see exactly what it means? Are you thinking 
about a new improved version of QuickRenderman ?

I remember that Steve Jobs tried to sell something like that to John 
Carmack at the time the new Apple was deciding for the 3D technology to 
use, they chosen OpenGL...

I am taking a look back to my copy of Renderman Companion and will see 
what we can do with that.

On an other side I am not convinced that it is so important to be gfx 
engine agnostic, I know well this kind of point of view, but for me the 
real interest of 3DKit is to provide a powerful object API to make 
easily 3D interactive world to do research experiment.

I am not sure that it is a good idea to try to build a formal 3D API 
without a concrete application in mind.

My own dream is to build a Maya like application in Cocoa ;) Maya is a 
good example because it is a typical modular application that allows 
people to build very specialized modeling/design  application, and the 
power of ObjC serve well this kind of approach.

We need this kind of objective to build something useful, unless that 
we will move from one idea to an other without real focus.

I know that a lot of people target game like application, but I think 
that game are very optimized code that will not be well made with an 
ObjC API. Maybe I am wrong ?

One of my main objective is to build a simple 3D toolkit that would be 
very simple to use for simple things but would be able to make more 
complicated things if needed.

I will come back to the discussion after the reading of the Renderman 
Companion (again :) )

One more thing : what is the status of GeometryKit, I am in the process 
to build a simple example to show the use of the math elements in the 
GeometryKit. Is it still interesting, or your re-design make it useless?


Best regards


On Sunday, December 22, 2002, at 04:17 PM, Philippe C.D. Robert wrote:

> Hi,
>
> while working on the new, simplified foundation of the 3DKit I'm 
> getting more and more convinced that what we really need is an 
> API/language which gives us great flexibility w/o limiting us to a 
> particular gfx implementation or pipeline. As a consequence I am 
> interested in a RenderMan like interface to be part of the 3DKit. This 
> would simplify the API and implementation of the RenderKit itself, 
> moreover it would ease the design of backend renderers - all this has 
> to be investigated more carefully, though.
>
> I'd like to hear your opinions about this, let me know if it fits into 
> your ideas and plans for the 3DKit.
>
> -Phil
> --
> Philippe C.D. Robert
> http://www.nice.ch/~phip
>
>
>
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