Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!uupsi!sunic!liuida!isy!jonas-y From: jonas-y@isy.liu.se (Jonas Yngvesson) Newsgroups: comp.graphics Subject: Re: Shading Language (was: AT&T Pixel machine) Message-ID: <1991Mar19.102613.25319@isy.liu.se> Date: 19 Mar 91 10:26:13 GMT References: <12303@ur-cc.UUCP> , <1991Mar18.191838.3220@pixar.com> Organization: Dept of EE, University of Linkoping Lines: 39 po0o+@andrew.cmu.edu (Paul Andrew Olbrich) writes: >An easy way to do this is to have your renderer be a big archive or >library, and then describe a scene to be rendered using a language such as C. >(With a RenderMan-ish syntax.) The scene description is then compiled and >linked to the rendering library, forming a big executable which generates >your image. ... >Does this make sense? ... (I'm a little incoherant at the moment after pulling >an all-nighter... my apologies.) Sure does. >PS. If anyone is interested I can answer questions about how to implement >something like this. I wrote a ray tracer that works this way with CSG, >object heirarchies, K/K bounding slabs, and shading language support. >Oh another benefit is when I do animation with this, I can generate >a single executable that generates all the frames based on a time >parameter. Since scene descriptions are all C, I can throw in splines or >make up silly functions to control movement. I did a short physical >simulation, and wrote that right into the scene description. To generate >the scene for a given frame, it would simulate the dynamics up till >that frame. This saves a lot of disk space. >This probably should be done in C++, I think, to be truely nifty. You can also pick up the SIPP rendering library from some ftp site. It is a library for rendering objects built of polygons using a scan line z-buffer and Phong shading. It uses just this approach. Each surface has a pointer to the shading function it should be shaded with. It is for example availiable from isy.liu.se (130.236.1.3) as pub/sipp-2.0.tar.Z --Jonas -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ J o n a s Y n g v e s s o n Dept. of Electrical Engineering jonas-y@isy.liu.se University of Linkoping, Sweden ...!uunet!isy.liu.se!jonas-y