Re: Lights (was Re: 64 bit version of Quesa)

[Roger H. <rog...@mi...>]

On 13 Mar, 2007, at 17:00, James Walker wrote:

> Roger Holmes wrote:
>
>> No. My mental model is that of the plug-in (shadow) renderer we ship
>> for Quesa, which I wrote. To speed up rendering, I do not do the slow
>> calculations for the texturing, shading, lighting (and shadowing) of
>> a z buffer pixel until I know it is front most. Game programmers have
>> control of their data and can cull lots of stuff which is behind
>> other items, but for fully user defined data this is not easy,
>> probably impossible without using more time than it saves. So for
>> each front most pixel there are dozens behind, and with user defined
>> ordering of the data that means I can save doing the calculations for
>> many of them.
>
> Oh, interesting.  Does your renderer use the GPU or is it all on  
> the CPU?

No it only uses the CPU. Version 3.6 used only one CPU but 4.0 will  
use them all. It is not an interactive renderer but it supports  
shadows and the quality is configurable to balance the complexity of  
the drawing, the available processing power, the time the user is  
willing to wait and the quality required. Turn off the bells and  
whistles and it could be used as an interactive renderer. A user  
visited us on Friday and showed us her 860,000 triangle model, and  
even the interactive renderer was struggling with it, and she was  
willing to wait several minutes for a fully rendered image, and she  
was using 3.6 under Rosetta!


>
> By the way, I notice that Quesa's contributors page has broken  
> links for
> MicroSpot.  Do you have replacements for them?
>


Could it please be changes to reference our home page  
www.microspot.co.uk

Robin Landsbert no longer works for Microspot. I am quite happy to  
credit him, but his e-mail address is no longer valid. Maybe my name  
should be first anyway as I was always more senior than Robin and in  
view of my big speed up exercise a while back.

Although we have an internal development build called 3D World, the  
issued version still is for OS9 on PowerPC (which uses real QuickDraw  
3D). Our shipping OS-X products which use Quesa are called Microspot  
Interiors and Microspot Modeller. We are about to ship a 4.0 version  
of Microspot Interiors for Intel and PowerPC and then we will do the  
extra plugins to make a 4.0 version of Modeller too. The program  
icons will be changing too.