[ANN] RenderMall Alpha.1

FROM : Dietmar Planitzer
DATE : Sat Jan 12 10:44:51 2002

I'm pleased to annouce the availability of the first public developer
version of the RenderMall framework for Apple's MacOS X 10.1.

Note: This version is of alpha quality and may only be of interest to
developers. A number of things are not fully implemented yet or are not
completely tested. I.e. the 'Preview Renderer' is currently only accessible
from the Cocoa application environment but not Carbon.

The complete package contains:

*) The RenderMall.framework which provides a renderer independent
  implementation of Pixar's RenderMan Interface Specification
  v3.2/3.1 together with many additional APIs for working with
  multiple contexts, plug-in renderers, resources and shaders.

*) A 'Preview Renderer' plug-in renderer which is based on OpenGL
  for real-time display of RIB data/files.

*) A 'RIBViewer' application for viewing multiple RIB files at once.

*) The 'ribcat' and 'ribinfo' CLI tools.

RenderMall is the first renderer independent RenderMan Interface
implementation. This makes it easy to write 3D applications on-top of the
familiar Ri calls without limiting the application to a particular renderer.
Such an application can take advantage of any RenderMan renderer as long as
this renderer implements the renderer plug-in interface defined by
RenderMall. Conversely, a RenderMall plug-in renderer can work with any
application as long as it is implemented on top of the RenderMall framework.

The RenderMall framework gives application developers a number of additional
APIs over the standard Ri calls:

*) The context manager allows the easy construction and management of
  multiple RI contexts. Contexts may be created for the sole purpose
  of reading/writing ASCII and binary RIB files but also for the
  purpose of rendering a 3D scene to a Cocoa NSView, a Carbon GrafPort,
  an off-screen area or just full-screen.

*) The renderer manager allows an application to enumerate all plug-in
  renderers available at a host, inquire its capabilities, specific
  attributes, options or shaders.
  It also makes the life of renderer plug-in writers easier by offering
  default implementations for tasks like parsing RIB files, declaration
  management or default implementations of the various standard
  procedurals.

*) The resource manager provides a way for applications to define memory
  based resources like RIB archives, images or shaders.
  It also gives a renderer plug-in writer tools at its hand to make the
  creation, discovering and processing of both disk- and memory-based
  resources simpler.

*) The shader manager may be used by applications to find out the actual
  type of a shader, how many arguments a shader has or what the exact
  declaration of each shader argument is.

RenderMall is distributed as open source and free software under a BSD
style license. It can be found at
<http://homepage.mac.com/dietmarplanitzer/FileSharing1.html>.

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RenderMan is a registered trademark of Pixar


Regards,

Dietmar Planitzer