some questions about different topics...

[Quan]

I've got some questions...

1. Me and stefan had a discussion about the realsoft render engine some days ago...
during that discussion i asked myself if it would be possible to render realsoft scenes with renderes like "indigo", "povray", "maxwell" or "yafray"... there are plugins for all of the known 3d programs like maya, cinema, max, blener and houdini... would it also be possible in realsoft?

2. I am courious about learning how to make a plugin or a script for realsoft. which languages do i need for this?
cpp for plugins and java script for scripts?

I'm actually leraning java... does it help me there?

What I'm planning to do:
i want to make a simple (and useful) tool to transform objects... like in "freehand mx".. in 3d space...
(know what i mean?)

many thanks in advance
Jan

(please ignore all the mistakes)

[guest]

Hi Quan :

What kind of plugin ? Freehand Mix is new to me . I'd be shocked and dismayed if RS made any attempts to allow other tracers to render their scenes . Raytracing is what Rs does best and I think any energies will be spent in that direction for the next few years anyway , but that's just my personal opinion .

What I would not be surprised to see would be a logical move toward SSE2 & 3 hardware accelerations and the ability to render using Gelato accelerations in V6 (again just my personal opinion) .

[fre_ber]

1. In theory, it would be possible to implement a new renderer or some kind of interface to an external renderer in an RS plugin. However, my initial reaction is that this would be a huge task and not suitable as a first learning project. Implementing a file format export plugin is easier, though. And about writing a plugin for an external renderer that enables it to read RS project files might also be possible - the full specification of the r3d format is, as far as I know, available.

2. Even though I assume that it is possible to write RS plugins in C++, the classes of the RS SDK are not implemented as C++ classes. If you want to use them as such you need to write a big bunch of wrapper-classes that encapsulate the C function calls. I would still recommend that standard C is used for RS plugins - at least during the beginning of the learning process. Knowing Java could help - both because the expression syntax is similar and because of the simple fact that if you know one programming language, it is often easier to learn a new one.