Re: [ANN] RenderMall Alpha.1

FROM : Jesús Díaz Blanco
DATE : Sun Jan 13 16:21:41 2002

Wow. Great!

j.

On Saturday, January 12, 2002, at 07:43 PM, Dietmar Planitzer wrote:

> 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>.
>
> --------------------------------------------
> RenderMan is a registered trademark of Pixar
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Dietmar Planitzer
>
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