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From: rick@pangea.Stanford.EDU (Rick Ottolini)
Newsgroups: comp.graphics
Subject: Re: Scene Description Standard (Renderman isn't good enough)
Message-ID: <1991May2.162138.4249@leland.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 2 May 91 16:21:38 GMT
References: <1991Apr30.211131.7166@nntp-server.caltech.edu> <1991May1.161329.26495@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu>
Sender: news@leland.Stanford.EDU (Mr News)
Organization: Stanford Univ. Earth Sciences
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In article <1991May1.161329.26495@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu> stparker@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu (Steve Parker) writes:
>    With these observations, I set out to design my input language.
>I have come up with an interpretive type language which has proved to
>be very powerful and very expandable.   At the bottom, I have attached
>a short piece of code which  renders a CSG face.  I would appreciate any
>inputs or *constructive* criticisms.

An example of a declarative binding to the RenderMan specification is the
scene description language in the ART part of SunVision.  I did not see a
declarative binding or metafile description to RenderMan in Upstill's book.

I wrote a declarative scene description language for the purposes of
scientific visualization a few years ago.  The goal was to represent discrete
data as 3-D geometric objects.  (Continuous samplings in 1-D, 2-D,
and 3-D have their own representation techniques such as graphs, surfaces,
and volumes.) I got tired of writing large amounts of generally repetitive PHIGS
code and of the slow edit-compile-run-debug cycle method of building scenes.

I modeled my scene description language after the [unpublished] metafile of
MacDraw.  The characteristics Iemulated from MacDraw was a rich set of
primitive objects, from zero to three dimensions and the method of compositing
into complex objects.  I also added a large set of object attributes,
generally most of the rendering capabilities of the PHIGS variants I was using.

The graphics shops that sell turn-key 3-D design systems at graphics trade
shows may have some very good scene description languages.  I haven't done
a systematic study of their products, but perhaps someone else in this
newsgroup could report on this.