Hi Wyatt,
I assume that the above methods involve SpeedTree prior to v5, which is what I am using. According to the SpeedTree website v5 includes a reorganization of the SDK. How much, I do not know, but maybe someone has experience with it and OSG.
I hope you get some answers about this, I personally have never used SpeedTree so I wouldn't know. But of course, in the mean time you can always research how much has changed between v5 and previous versions and see if their SDK provides any support/documentation/API for hooking it into a third party rendering engine...
I assume that the above reference to CG means nvidia Cg?
I assume so too.
3 Isn't an option because we want to integrate SpeedTree, not rewrite it. Our goal is to use SpeedTree not develop a copy. Having seen the source code, there is much more to it than porting geometry and shaders.
Option 3 didn't imply rewriting SpeedTree. It's more akin to writing a new renderer for it. SpeedTree would do the simulation and whatever it does to generate the trees and their geometry, and you would take that geometry (or the description of the geometry, i.e. vertices, primitives, etc.) and copy/use them to OSG data structures to get them displayed as part of an OSG scene graph. As the poster of the quoted message mentioned, since OSG would do the rendering, you would need to reimplement the SpeedTree shaders in GLSL so that OSG could use them.
This is very different from rewriting SpeedTree... I hope you don't think SpeedTree only does rendering of the trees, it does much more than that, and in fact the more difficult parts are generating the trees from specifications and tree types, making them react to wind, etc. and these would still be done by SpeedTree. Only the last step, rendering itself, would need to be reimplemented in OSG.
Note that option 2 might be possible too, the osgNV nodekit provides support for Cg shaders in OSG, though it's been a while since I've heard any news about it so I don't know if it's up to date anymore or if the author(s) abandoned it in favor of OSG's built-in support for GLSL.
Sorry, apart from that I can't really help. As I mentioned, I've never used SpeedTree myself nor integrated it into an OSG-based app.
J-S -- ______________________________________________________ Jean-Sebastien Guay [email protected] http://www.cm-labs.com/ http://whitestar02.webhop.org/ _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
