Hi all... To make things clear: I DONT want to start a X .vs. Y discussion here, I'm just polling for the current state of tools for content pipelines, which CAN include references to other scenegraphs/rendering engines.
I have a pretty clear picture of what OSG can and cannot (after using it for 9 years or so.....:-) Its more of whats NOT in OSG that I trying to get a view of. I came across a posting in February with the subject: CgToGLSL 0.8 and Experimental daeReader). Google says: http://openscenegraph.net/archiver/osg-users/2007-February/index.html (which is now moved to openscenegraph.org, but the email archive does not stretch further than july 2007). It was about a toolchain that converted exported collada files from maya using Cg shaders to glsl shaders with support for 1 render technique/1 pass in the dae reader. It is certainly interesting stuff as we are looking for a pipeline to a scenegraph (osg or other) that can handle Maya material exporting. The question is, what is the current "state-of-the-art" when it comes to export more "advanced" materials (than diffuse textures) from a modeling toolkit, including multipass/render-to-texture, etc getting it into a scene, where shadows and integration of other exported models work. Are there any projects out there for OpenSceneGraph that tries to solve the "shader-hell"? Getting dynamic shadows, normalmapping, lightmaps, various reflection models efficiently rendered in a scene? I'm curious, because either you see simulators with diffuse textures, some alpha textures, and if they have per pixel shaders, they are hand coded with quite a few lines of explicit code for setting up render passes. What I'm looking for I guess is more complete support for the Collada spec... This also relates to skinning and animation. Collada has support for all that, and having native support for it in osg would make osg so much more competitive in all fields of use. So what is the current status/momentum behind Collada/osg integration? Is it actively used at numerous companies with need for multi-pass shaders, animation/skeleton/skinning? To me, after using Cal3D quite a few years in ReplicantBody, I really feel that its an abstraction too many. Native support for these things in osg would make it stand out. In comparison, Ogre3D have native support for these things, including hw skinning support/sse acceleration. However Ogre3D is a more specific solution to a problem, OSG is more general with less assumption on the final use... >From my point of view: 3DSMax: I have been using osgExp, its great, however it doesn't export any shaders, animations, skeletons. Maya: There is an osg exporter, but with more or less the same support for data. What is the status there? Is it being developed at all? Blender: is even more rudimentary, right? (The collada physics exporter from Collada is not very good at all). Lightwave - Osg has readers for both the geometry and the scene format. Creator: Recent versions has support for shaders and render passes, right? But the .flt reader does not handle that, or? As I see it right now, the only way in that in theory support what we need is: Collada. Another related thing is support for trees and bushes. Assume you want to have 20-30.000 trees + terrain + hw-animated bushes/grass. Is there any solutions available in the osg community today? Except perhaps for SpeedTree? Once again relating to a cousin scene graph out there on the cybernet: http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=36655 Now Im not looking for comments such as: If its not there do it yourself. Once again, Im trying to get a picture of whats currently NOT in osg , but IS available/developed in the community commercial/non-commercial solutions. For example I know of EON Reality, which as a very complete VR authoring solution, which is using OpenSceneGraph, and of course have all of the above (perhaps not skeleton/skinning in hw though). Other "pipelines" solutions? Comments? -- ________________________________________________________________ Anders Backman Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] HPC2N/VRlab Phone: +46 (0)90-786 9936 Umea university Cellular: +46 (0)70-392 64 67 S-901 87 UMEA SWEDEN Fax: +46 90-786 6126 http://www.cs.umu.se/~andersb
_______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
