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Article #320

Summary: lines, arcs, curves in RenderMan?

#320
From: J. G. Gregory
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 1992 17:11
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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
Technical Details
Message-ID: <1992Jul29.171112.2024@proforma.com>
Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!sparky!uunet!proforma!jgg

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Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.programmer
Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!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