Re: Advanced Rendering Interface

On Sunday, December 22, 2002, at 09:06  Uhr, Brent Gulanowski wrote:
> On Sunday, December 22, 2002, at 10:17  AM, Philippe C.D. Robert wrote:
>> 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.
>
> I read the RenderMan FAQ and I'm still a bit unclear on the exact 
> nature of the RenderMan system. I'll have to read some more documents. 
> The key seems to be the API/RBI. Does the language involve the 
> production of geometry as well as the submission of triangles and 
> shader instructions? Is the model data maintained by the renderer and 
> accessed/modified through the use of the API/RBI? If so, that really 
> changes my understanding of the best way to organize things, but I can 
> see that it would allow for many improvements to the performance. 
> Perhaps you don't intend to go quite that far. Please expand on how 
> you would manage models.

I suggest you have a look at the original NeXT 3DKit which originally 
motivated me to do the GNU 3DKit. Basically the scene graph would 
remain as we discussed but instead of directly using OpenGL or 
Raytracing or whatever to implement our renderer API we'd use the 
RenderMan API which would have to be implemented by the various 
renderers.

BTW I do not suggest to use the complete RenderMan specification, maybe 
only a subset at first.

> Are you thinking about defining a new shader language as well?

No, we could use RenderMan for that as well.

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