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- Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.programmer
- Path: sparky!uunet!proforma!jgg
- From: jgg@proforma.com (J. G. Gregory)
- Subject: Summary: lines, arcs, curves in RenderMan?
- Message-ID: <1992Jul29.171112.2024@proforma.com>
- Keywords: renderman, 3dkit
- Sender: jgg@proforma.com
- Organization: Pro Forma
- Date: Wed, 29 Jul 1992 17:11:12 GMT
- Lines: 20
-
- I received a few email replies and there was some news traffic on this topic.
- I received one good email reply. The rest and all the news traffic was as
- misinformed as I.
-
- You CAN do "infinitely thin" object drawing in the 3Dkit. Some posters called
- these "2D" objects. They are not. They are 3D objects. However, they are
- conceptually 1D parametric objects, and thus have no "thickness" and cannot be
- rendered.
-
- However, (and this is what I hoped/expected) NeXT's 3Dkit has extended
- RenderMan to "Quick RenderMan", and it is in Quick RenderMan that support for
- curvilinear geometry exists. That is the good news. The bad news is that
- there is no documentation, to my knowledge, of Quick RenderMan, nor could I
- locate any source code examples.
-
- However, thanks to Dwight Lee, who pointed me to a header file, we were able to
- draw lines after a little experimentation. These lines do seem to disappear
- when any shader is invoked, but draw just fine in wireframe mode.
-
- --J Gregory
-