yuri++at++yurix-sim.com
Date: 09/08/2004 02:26:49
Hello Alex,
Certainly, there is a much tighter integration now of what you model and
what you code. What DCC systems do you use (+plugins, custom macros/scripts,
etc) to streamline this integration? Which file formats do you use that
Performer can read and use your DCC-created shaders?
Anybody else would like to contribute opinions in this regard?
Regards,
Yuri.
Alexander Lechner writes:
> On Wednesday 08 September 2004 04:06, Alexandre Naaman wrote:
>> Hi Simon,
>>
>> > I have a question about the next Performer version, I hope someone can
>> > help me:
>> >
>> > Will OpenGL Shading Language be supported and if yes: When is Performer
>> > 3.2 supposed to be available?
>> > I'm thinking about working with GPU programming in Performer and don't
>> > want to start with the GL_ARB_vertex/fragment_program Extensions, if the
>> > GL_ARB_Shader_Objects stuff will soon be supported. Therfore it's very
>> > important for me, for how long I have to wait...
>>
>> Yes, support for GLSL will be in 3.2. At this point we're merely doing
>> fine tuning to our support for GLSL and adding "external" features, like
>> support for ATI's RenderMonkey, samples, documentation, etc.
>>
>> If there's anything in particular you'd like to see for this feature in
>> 3.2 please advise. The API is more or less frozen but that doesn't stop us
>> from making additions in other parts of the release.
>>
> We've already implemented a Cg binding in our VR framework Avango (which also
> features a Performer renderer). A crucial think I observed is a tight
> integration of Geometry AND Shaders. For performance reasons it is obvious to
> use pfGeoArrays, but I think they have a rather clumsy interface in
> Performer. There should be more helper functions to cope with them. Say for
> example when you want to generate binormals and tangets for a geometry in a
> pfGeoArray or when trying to rearrange the vertices in a cache friendly way,
> things get really complicated if you want to do this in a general manner.
> When a pfGeoArray is being shaded by a GLSL shader (or Cg), the attributes
> must be bound to the location the shader expects them. Maybe there could be
> some clever way to match them.
> Regarding parameters there should be some possibility to access the current PF
> viewmatrix (without having to invert and post-rotate it!), current model
> matrix and alike in the shaders. Maybe there could be some special functions
> in pfGProgramParams to bind the current model matrix (normal, transposed,
> inverted, inverted transposed) and so on to named parameters.
>
> I really appreciate the hard effort you put into the integration of these
> techonlogies as it's often more difficult to bring them into an exisiting
> system than designing a system (using these technologies) from scratch like
> NVSG.
>> In terms of timing, we should have Alphas/Betas soon. Stay tuned ... I'll
>> let Allan reply to the details of the timing concerning the release of
>> 3.2.
> Good news!
>
> Thanks,
> Alex
>>
>> Hope this helps,
>>
>> Alex.
>>
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> Alexander.Lechner ++at++ vertigo-systems.de
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>
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