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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