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From: rthomson@mesa.dsd.es.com (Rich Thomson)
Newsgroups: comp.graphics.visualization
Subject: Re: Info. about PEX & 3D visualization needed.
Message-ID: <1991Feb21.185808.27375@dsd.es.com>
Date: 21 Feb 91 18:58:08 GMT
References: <1570@vtsai2.sai.vtt.fi>
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Reply-To: rthomson@dsd.es.com (Rich Thomson)
Organization: Design Systems Division, Evans & Sutherland, SLC, UT
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In article <1570@vtsai2.sai.vtt.fi>
	suzuki@vtsai2.sai.vtt.fi writes:
>Dear networld, please allow me to make questions.
>We are planning to make visualization tools on Sun and Tektronix.
>(or any other WS which we will use in the future.)
>We will use triangle polygons for surface rendering.
>To make our tool machine-independent, we decided to use X-window.
>
>1)Does PEX can surface rendering using triangle polygons?

PEX (the first sample implementation will be released with R5 of X11,
supposedly around the end of February) supports the following surface
primitives:

    2D/3D polygons
    planar polygons with holes
    triangular strip
    quadrilateral mesh

All of those primitives can have these attributes: vertex colors,
vertex normals, facet color, and facet normals.

I anticipate the PEX-SI to be widely used within a year of its
introduction.  It is oriented towards 8-bit pseudocolor visuals (i.e.
the largest portion of the X community) and the device dependant layer
of the PEX-SI (sample implementation) uses the dix/ddx layers of
X to do its rendering, so it will be portable to a any platform that
uses the MIT server (or any server preserving the dix/ddx porting layer).

Members of the PEX consortium have had access to the sample
implementation before release to the X community and have been working
on commercial implementations of PEX.  These implementations don't
necessarily follow the technique of using dix/ddx rendering in their
dipex layers.  Usually they modify the dipex layer to use custom 3D
rendering hardware to accelerate performance.

Some vendors following something similar to this are: Convex, Evans &
Sutherland, Stardent and others that I have forgotten (or don't know
about ;-).

>2)If not, are there any other recommended graphics library which we can
>use for surface rendering on both SUN and Tektronix?

Perhaps xgks would fit your needs, but I haven't used it myself.

>(or 3)Do we have to make visualization tools for each our WS? 8-) )

Ugh.  I'd hate to have to write the same tool over for each platform.

							-- Rich
-- 
  ``Read my MIPS -- no new VAXes!!'' -- George Bush after sniffing freon
	    Disclaimer: I speak for myself, except as noted.
UUCP: ...!uunet!dsd.es.com!rthomson		Rich Thomson
ARPA: rthomson@dsd.es.com			PEXt Programmer