Re: [Gnu3dkit-discuss] Re: NSOpenGL RenderKit

[Philippe C . D . Robert]

Hi,

On Thursday, October 24, 2002, at 01:15  Uhr, Lyndon Tremblay wrote:
> 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...

Yes, I also think Frederic's approach is more realistic.

> > 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.

I strongly believe that a 3DKit supporting various renderers will be 
much more useful in the long term - for research purposes as well as 
for application writers. I already have a basic design approach in 
mind, hopefully it will take me only few days to write that down in a 
clean, simple way, so that we can discuss this further. The ultimate 
goal is to have an API which allows others to write renderer plugins to 
be used directly by the 3DKit.

BTW are you already working actively on such an OGL based RenderMan 
renderer?

Any further input on that subject is really appreciated!

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