Hi Robert, hi all, During the past few days, I was thinking of implementing a resource system, as well as a rendering structure which could support both forward and deferred rendering for OSG. This could help developers design complex materials and effects, test cutting-edge GPU techniques, and implement multi-pass / deferred rendering pipelines with user-friendly interfaces or even a readable script format. Similar work were already done in some game engines like Ogre3D, CryEngine and Unreal, and I now plan to work out something with the same power and can fit our OSG users much better. :-)
My initial thoughts are: 1. A resource system records all the resource used in the rendering pipeline, including textures, state attributes, shaders, uniforms, camera parameters, and semantics (not used in GLSL, but very useful IMHO). Resource can be referred by other resource, or obtained from APIs to be altered. It can be recorded in an XML-based format for reading/writing, and external uses. 2. A rendering framework uses one or more techniques, passes, and connect their inputs/outputs for complex render work. It can also be recorded by the resource system and is implemented as a group node in the scene graph, which performs actual forward/deferred rendering work. 3. Some in-built techniques and passes can help implement some complex effects on customized scene quickly. Common ones I planned include HDR, SSDO, godrays, depth of field, motion blur, lensflare, color grading and FXAA. A benchmark could be developed first to show how the framework works. 4. Reader/writers could be developed then to convert DAE, CGFX, or even other game engine scripts into OSG native rendering pipelines, which will greatly help migrations from other engines. The resource system itself is actually abstract and can be extended to contain whole scene information later, so it could be placed in the osgDB library. And the new rendering pipeline, which can totally replace current osgFX functionlities, can be placed in osgFX and rendering resource management will be done here, too. I'm glad to work with others who has interests in such an idea, and hope an initial version could be finished before OSG 3.2. For the first stage I will borrow some code from the osgPostEffects library in my experimental osgXI project, to quickly build the low-level APIs of the framework. But anyone who have better ideas, or could contribute some code or effects will be really appreciated. Cheers, Wang Rui
_______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
