On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 6:03 AM, R Fritz <[email protected]> wrote:
> I guess I'm not too surprised. There seems to be an overall lack of >> expertise in 3D graphics. Lots of people practice it without adequate >> training or education. Ever look at a GL capture of SketchUp? It's utter >> crap, glBegin/glEnd all the way. >> > > Would fixing the OpenGL problems of SketchUp improve its performance as a > modeling tool? That's its great strength, after all. How would you make it > work, if you were designing it? I think that would depend upon how you qualify "performance". Replacing glBegin/glEnd to using vertex arrays will improve framerates/allow for larger models without impacting interactivity. In terms of usability it won't effect things save for being a bit more fluid and scalable. There is the wider issue of if the can't write to OpenGL fast paths such as vertex arrays that has been the mainstay of good OpenGL programming for the last decade then there is likely to be a whole raft of other issues that a bit of good 3D graphics knowhow could improve upon, this is when you might see real usability/productivity gains. This point about some software vendors knowing very little about 3D graphics development but writing 3D graphics applications reminds me of the sermons that SGI, in their good years, used to give in their newsletters/papers/dev conferences about writing efficient graphics applications, they really tried hard with education. You just know the frustration they had with software vendors crucifing their loverly new hardware with crappy graphics apps. Another thing that SGI used to do was promote the use of scene graphs to solve this problem but moving software vendors up the food chain so they could take advantage of all the know how and avoid the pitfalls. This is where the OSG would come in these days :-) Robert.
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