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Re: [Gnu3dkit-discuss] considering G3DGeometry
From: |
Brent Gulanowski |
Subject: |
Re: [Gnu3dkit-discuss] considering G3DGeometry |
Date: |
Sun, 16 Mar 2003 19:16:59 -0500 |
On Sunday, March 16, 2003, at 06:41 PM, Philippe C.D. Robert wrote:
Please elaborate. I have been thinking about this a lot and its seems
worthy of investigation, but if you know any serious reasons that
would make it unrealistic, I would appreciate if you could mention
them. If I want to browse
If you create a new geometry class how do you make sure that every
existing renderer can handle it? If you write let's say a 3D modeller,
you would maybe want to use parametric surfaces together w/ an OGL
renderer, but how would you turn the created surfaces let's say into
equivalent implicit surfaces used by another, raytracing based > backend?
There are many questions like these which are not easy to answer.
Undoubtedly! These questions are, however, more in line with my skills
and interests than, e.g.: implementing shader parsers and designing
shaders. If it comes down to a mathematical solution, again I'll
probably leave it up to someone else, but as for setting the priorities
of the representation types, and synchronizing them, and writing the
state management logic which determines which ones to use when, this
intrigues me very much.
I don't think you can make sure that every renderer instance can have a
visually identical (or even very similar) representation. It would
perhaps be possible to generate an approximation, or use a default rep.
Given a PDF, how does NSImage produce a TIFF or a JPEG or whatever?
Math of some sort! It must involve some kind of dependency graph from
one representation which stores the most overall information down to
that which stores the least. Potentially with two manually produced
reps (or one manual, the other generated and tweaked by user/artist),
you might then have enough fundamental information to generate most
other possible reps, given a library of translation algorithms and a
support class to implement them and return the desired rep.
I have a lot more thinking to do. Sometimes the applications of 3D tech
that I am interested in would use 3D objects merely as a means of
communication. This is very different than using 3D to render
photo-realistic images. I know that games are not your focus (maybe you
don't even like them), but they are another example where
representation has symbolic, not literal, purpose, no matter the
current obsession with realism in 3D games. I am interested in 3D
virtual toys, in 3D user interfaces, and the use of 3D for
visualization of information that is not inherently graphical (like
structural relationships).
In such applications, representations are much more fluid, and much
more dependent upon the viewing environment. Like with a 2D graphical
user interface, what is a cube in one place might look like a flower or
a tree or a television or anything else in other places. For me, visual
representation is merely a surface applied onto a structural system. A
scene graph is an example of a very common data organization method,
which can be used for much more than strictly spatial data. I am highly
interested in finding structural similarities between 3D scenes and
other information matrices (not algebra!).
Brent Gulanowski
--
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