Re: Advanced Rendering Interface

On Tuesday, January 7, 2003, at 02:15  Uhr, Gerard Iglesias wrote:
> Happy new year and best wishes....

Thanks, same 2u all!

> On Thursday, December 26, 2002, at 01:18 PM, Philippe C.D. Robert 
> wrote:
>>> OK you want to make a new QuickRenderman implementation, not a bad 
>>> idea, in fact maybe it is a real good idea and make sense on the Mac 
>>> platform ;)
>>
>> I am not sure if a pure QRM implementation would be worth it, but I 
>> have to look more into this... anyway, the most interesting part 
>> would probably be the RenderMan shader language.
>
> Sorry to be more precise I was thinking of implementing the Renderman 
> API in OpenGL, that is using real time rendering technique to 
> implement shaders, but that is true that it doesn't mean getting 
> something running in real time....
>
> QRM was a simplification of the rendering process to get something 
> running at a correct speed on a NeX 68040 ;)

QRM was very limited - shading was essentially not there. I am not sure 
that we need a RenderMan renderer anymore, but if we can implement a 
shading language/compiler which is compliant to the RenderMan Shading 
Language but uses an OpenGL backend, this would be almost perfect..:-)

> And sure the tough part will be to implement renderman shader in 
> OpenGL, in fact a very interesting engineering/research problem, good 
> point and a subject by itself, good ....

Yup ...:-) It is like reimplementing SGI OpenGL Shader, and I am not 
sure I am allowed to work on such a beast.

>> If it is additional stuff, yes why not - esp. having more physics 
>> functionality would be cool! As for the current C implementation, I 
>> think it is quite well optimised, but then there are always ways to 
>> improve..
>
> I was thinking about new geometrical stuff, there is also physical 
> stuff in it, a simple port would be possible, I don't think that the 
> given code is very optimised, and I will take a look at the licensing 
> agreement.

You mean you want to integrate some existing code into the GeometryKit? 
What is it you want to integrate into the GeometryKit, if I may ask?

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