Re: Fwd: vrml browsers

Aaron Brancotti - Virtual ([email protected])
Sun, 4 Jun 1995 14:47:21 +0200


Hi there!

Greg Scallan says:

> The VRML spec is definitely tilted toward OpenGL. The Nodes are pretty
much 1-1
>mappings to OpenGL calls. Some Nodes will need additional code to be
implemented in
>RenderMorphics, but generaly not too much. The problem comes into play
when you
>need to specify things like different colors for
ambient/diffuse/specular/emissive
>properties of a material and the 3D API doesn't support that. OpenGL
supports this,
>RenderMorphics probably doesn't. Thus, if you can live without ever having
this
>type of functionality, you'd be ok to use rendermorphics. However, the
fact that
>rendermorphics does not support these types of calculations may point to
some of the
>reasons they are so much faster. Whatever you do, I would suggest writing
to your
>own 3D API independant layer so you could *plug in* OpenGL/RenderMorphics or
>whatever 3D API you want. Which API is best is difficult to tell, and
depends on
>the application, the user, and the platform. Being flexible in this area
is pretty
>easy to do.

Yup. Well, I don't know if RL can, but you can use those material attributes
with Autodesk CDK ( BTW: nobody talks about CDK, even if it is a very good
graphics/simulation framework.. ), and CDK is renderer-independant; you can
use Rendermorphics, if you want... and this is exactly what Greg means.

Aaron