[prog] General purpose 3d graphics engine

[Tauscher]

Hi Miriam,

> VRML/X3D http://www.web3d.org/
> Blender http://www.blender.org/
> POV-Ray http://www.povray.org/

thank you very much for the comprehensive overview of these three - a file format, a modelling application and a renderer (a little bit simplified classification, but I think it meets their core). I stumbled upon those in the past, but for some reasons decided to use other tools, see later on. Did you also program interactive apps with realtime rendering? This is more, what I am looking for. I wonder if there are other people on this list 3d interactive applications, scientific visualisations in 3 dimensions or 3d games? I would be very interested in an exchange about the libraries you use. Has anybody used e.g. Soya3D, Panda3D, Coin, OSG ...? Here's my experiences so far:

_modeling application_
During my architectural education I was tought to use the commercial Audodesk and former discreet applications. I always wanted to learn blender, since I knew about it, but there was no opportunity, because I realised, that using a full featured modeling application for my purpose was to bloated. If you try to simulate an only small cellular automaton with a scripting language from inside such an application, it will eat your memory und let you sit there waiting for eternity or the crash of your system.

So I used the computer graphics kit (http://cgkit.sourceforge.net) instead. It is a python library that allows you to build the scene graph model in memory and to output it to a renderer or interactive viewer (based on pygame).

_renderer_
As cgkit supports the renderman specification for rendering I tried Aqsis (http://www.aqsis.org/) and Pixie (http://www.renderpixie.com/). I wrote shaders for non photo-realistic (NPR) comic style rendering, created some animations and video sequences, rendered them frame by frame and arranged them as a video with further tools, but these are beyound the scope of the topic. I had also a look at Povray but as it neither supports realtime-rendering for interactivity nor scripting, I didn't explore it very deeply.

_file formats_
A human readable file format has a lot of advantages, and so have standards, which are supported by different viewers and libraries. But you reach the limitation of 3D ore 4D file formats if you come to domainspecific information needed on top of the scene description. If you just want to provide a description of a virtual world scene for the user to explore, X3D may still be the preferred choice over any proprietary crap like 3d-pdf. But this is case is very rare, isn't it?

What I am interested in is a 3d graphics engine which can be used to create interactive applications without diving down to OpenGL.

Helga