Re: [Aqsis-development] GUI research and thoughts

[Matthias B. <mat...@gm...>]

Paul Gregory wrote:
>    1. Load scene data in RIB format, and present a navigable view of the
>       scene and renderer state at any point in the pipeline.
>    2. Create and modify 'materials' as a combination of shaders, layers,
>       and possibly other look based elements. This would probably
>       include combining the various parts that make up a look in
>       RenderMan, so bringing together surface, displacement, and volume
>       shading into a material. These elements would be separable and
>       reusable as individual elements. I also plan to maximise our layer
>       capability.
>    3. Simplified control over the renderer settings, with pre-sets for
>       preview, SD 4:3 SD 16:9 HD, etc., taking the lead from official TV
>       and film specifications.
>    4. Simplified camera control, again, taking settings where possible
>       from official sources of camera information, for easy matching to
>       real footage.
>    5. Some form of scripted pipeline integration, so materials applied,
>       changes to settings, etc. can be recorded to a 'filter' script of
>       sorts, so that the same settings can be applied to the assets as
>       they change. That is, if a RIB file, or other 3D file changes,
>       animation changes etc. the script can be applied to immediately
>       apply the changes configured in a previous session in the GUI.
>    6. Scriptable and extendable, so common operations can be simplified,
>       and new functionality added. Ideas for future additional
>       functionality would be network rendering control, asset
>       management, etc.

Is this also meant to be used for shader authoring? This is something I
was already thinking about. I was originally thinking of an Eclipse
plugin though but it could also be done as an external tool. From your
description it seems that your tool has more functionality but it also
sounds like the functionality required for such a shader authoring tool
(or rather, shader previewing tool when it's outside Eclipse) is a
subset of the functionality you need for your tool.
The functionality specific to previewing shaders would be to monitor a
shader source file and recompile it and rerender whenever the file
changes. And the tool should come with some built-in sample objects and
lighting configurations, so that you could really concentrate on writing
the shader and don't have to waste time setting up a test scene.

It seems your intention was more to provide a front-end for rendering a
scene (available as RIB) that was authored elsewhere but doesn't have
shaders set up yet. Where would the RIB file typically come from? Is the
tool supposed to work together with Mosaic or Liquid?

Cheers,

- Matthias -