Now that is a subject line to make everybody curious, isn' it? ;-)

Well, here is an idea of mine, that I thought could come handy for our
MovieProject (http://www.algonet.se/~jhubert/MovieProject ), or for any
animation.

I was thinking about the POB (Pov Binary Format) by Thomas Baier (his
homepage: http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/thbaier/ ).
To those who don't know of it: He wrote a custom version of POV-Ray that
reads a POV-file as usual and while parsing it, it writes all objects it
finds into a chunk-based binary format, that can be read by other
applications *much* easier than the very complex POV-Ray text format.

Anyway, what I was thinking about was this:

Changing this version of POV-Ray, so that instead of writing an object
description into a binary file, it creates an OpenGL version of this object
and when the whole scene is parsed, the OpenGL objects would be shown,
instead of the rendered picture. Since OpenGL is quite fast, actually the
parsing speed would be the limiting factor. OpenGL is quite cross-platform
too, so such a version could even be made usable on many platforms.

I didn't think about a version that can really do *everything* and all
objects, but more of a version that can do the most important POV-Ray
primitives in OpenGL. No special textures, lighting etc., everything in one
color (or two or three...), so that one would get an OpenGL preview of the
scene.
Since that would be very fast (limited only by the parsing speed), you could
use it very much for animation previews. Animation in realtime!
You have an animated character and want to check it's movements before the
real render, or you have a scene with objects flying around and want to see
how they are synchornized, that sort of stuff.

I have a bit of OpenGL experience from my TreeDesigner project
(http://www.algonet.se/~jhubert/TreeDesigner ), and was thinking about
programming such a "Realtime Previewer", but I don't know how soon I might
find the time.
So I thought I put it up here, maybe somebody else is interested in doing it
faster than I will be able to?

Johannes -:- MovieProject Coordinator

Post a reply to this message