[Edu-sig] PyGeo vs PovRay

[Jason L. Asbahr]

At 01:48 PM 3/3/00 -0500, David Scherer wrote:
>At present, I am working with a prototype implementation which, like PyGeo,
>uses PyOpenGL for rendering.  Once we are satisfied with the interface, I
>plan to re-implement the library with a custom graphics engine in C++, which
>will probably use OpenGL directly to render polygons (if it's good enough
>for Quake 3... :).  Although it obviously won't be a raytracer, the presence
>of an engine written by knowledgable graphics coders in a fast
>implementation language makes all kinds of powerful rendering techniques
>available.  For example, the engine could transparently do stereo rendering
>with anaglyph or shutter glasses, replace lines with shaded cylinders or
>alpha 'trails', interpolate curves for added detail, or reduce unnecessary
>detail in order to maintain a high frame rate.  It could also support
>advanced primitives like height and even volume fields at interactive frame
>rates.
>
>The internals of the graphics engine aren't intended to be exposed to the
>beginning coder, any more than the internals of the Python interpreter or
>the OpenGL library itself are.  I don't see that as a problem - you have to
>draw the line at *some* level of abstraction.

This is a good way to go -- also, check out the OpenRM Scene Graph
on SourceForge.  Gizmo3D is also an interesting open source scene
graph effort.  There may be some possibilities for merging.

Cheers,

Jason Asbahr
Origin Systems, Inc.
jasbahr@origin.ea.com