Hello Joachim, > I mean, there's absolutely NO POINT in raytracing if you can't reproduce > the exact result (plus global illumination, that is) OSG delivers > natively with OpenGL rasterization!
That depends on what you're trying to achieve... In my case, I am just trying to precompute some shadows (and other things) so I can just use simple intersection tests and do the rest of the rendering with the normal OpenGL pipeline. I don't need to reproduce everything, but I agree that's not a complete raytracer. > Personally, I think interfacing to a different rendering backend might > be more promising. In the beginning of my project I tried to create an interface between OSG and yafaray (the next generation of yafray, Blender's integrated raytracer). The problem was propagating changes in the OSG scene graph to yafaray's internal data structures. yafaray was not created for this purpose, so for example it does not store transformation matrices, just the raw vertices with transformations baked in. So it would have implied either adding transformation matrices to yafaray (which the author did not agree on), or re-transforming all the vertices each time (which would be slow). That's just an example, the end result is that eevn though it would have been cool, I decided I did not need a complete raytracer integration. So I settled on just using intersection testing and doing the rest myself. > Maybe a translation from the OSG scene description language to Renderman > or PovRay might do the job... That would do for raytracing static scenes, but what would be even better would be to integrate a raytracer into OSG so that it can track the changes to the scene graph and work on the same scene as the realtime portion, as described above. We're not there yet, but I think Adrian's changes are a step in the right direction. Once I finish my Masters, I hope I will be able to help on this. There have been lots of publications lately on developing so-called realtime raytracers, and if OSG can go in that direction (in addition to being the great scenegraph that it is), we could give an engine like OpenRT [1], which is not Open Source despite its name, a run for its money (so to speak). Imagine, getting a realtime engine like Direct3D but cross-platform, and a realtime raytracer like OpenRT but Open Source... Taht would kick serious arse. :-) We'll see what the future holds... J-S [1] http://www.openrt.de/ -- ______________________________________________________ Jean-Sebastien Guay [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://whitestar02.webhop.org/ ---------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program. _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
