Re: [Visualpython-users] Snapshots/Raytracing: Ari out of control :)

[Ari H. <ahe...@an...>]

On Thu, Oct 19, 2000 at 01:07:59PM -0400, David Scherer wrote:
> 
> Wrong.  Raytracers use analytic curved surfaces, so they will render much
> better spheres, etc.  They can do specular highlights, reflection,

mph. picky picky :) i guess i'm just a bit jaded to raytracers.

> refraction, and all manner of other neat stuff with materials.  As I noted

true enough. i would hate to see a lot of effort go into good material
support for raytracers before Visual comes anywhere near exhausting the
flexibility of GL in that area. 

Of course people may feel comfortable implementing a povray exporter but not
hacking GL. There's actually something very useful to be done here: the main
difficulty in implementing textures and better material support in Visual
itself is the interface -- the GL is easy enough to write the question is
how to make the Python interface intuitive. If someone were to iterate
through and develop a nice interface on top of Visual for adding attributes
for raytracing, it would be a big help for implementing a similar interface
for materials in Visual. The timing even lines up: by the time a preliminary
raytracing interface was ready, I might actually have time to work on GL
material support.

> 
> Every GL implementation I've seen (I confess to not knowing anything about
> Mesa) can create a GL context pointing at an offscreen surface and software
> render to it.  I would be very surprised to learn that no one has ever
> implemented a CGI script that way.

good point. /me is clearly not thinking.

Mesa supports this of course.

unfortunately GtkGLArea is not likely to be very happy -- Gtk does want a
display. Was there a good reason we were using Gtk as opposed to straight
GLX?






ari