FWIW, I like Michael's idea of just having an OpenGL shaded viewport he codes himself. That way he can add AO, lighting modes, etc based on the video card available (I suspect the OpenGL api takes care of most of this). That way we can have realtime views.

Hi Chipp, well the kind of renderer that I was referring to would likely be an offline type renderer where it goes off and crunches for a minute or something, not a realtime viewport display one.

That generally makes it easier to focus on quality instead of totally on speed at the expense of quality. So I'll be able to do things like generate a custom mesh for the render that's fitted to the render image screen space so you won't see any polygons. There are some pieces in place to do some of that now actually, the PDF/AI exporter in V3 does that for the shaded background image.

The OpenGL API doesn't is actually pretty low level, it doesn't really take care of any of those sorts of things for you it involves a whole bunch of custom shader programs and work unfortunately.

That's not to say I wouldn't want an integrated renderer to be pretty fast, but realtime is a different thing yet than that.

- Michael

Hi PaQ,

that is a very nice looking rendering. Do I understand correctly that it was done in MoI? At least you show it in the MoI viewport.
Unfortunately I don't understand the following:

Here's a little shader test, using no lights.

- Point incidence gradient to create the cell diffuse look
- camera incidence gradient for the rim light (self illumination)
- multiply by an occlusion as self-illumination.

-Martin

Hi Martin,

Sorry for the confusion, it's actually a 'fake' screen.
It's rendered in Modo, using easy (fast) computing method : only gradients and an ambient occlusion. (no raytrace shadow, no GI, etc)

And it's hard to be worried about it. Just upgraded to Simlab 8 and it just keeps getting better and better!

They really are putting a lot of effort into presentation abilities, for sharing stuff. It's really hard to beat....

And SimLab Composer Light is free! max 1920 * 1040 ;)
http://www.simlab-soft.com/3d-products/simlab-composer-freelicensee.php#lite

Hi chippwalters and PaQ and everyone.

If you have Rhino+Thea Render it's also very easy and very very fast to generate realtime pseudo ambient occlusion
rendering in three easy steps :

1) Copy past object from Moi to Rhino

2) In rhino assign to all objects a simple white diffuse material

3) Play realtime viewport rendering with TheaRender plugin

Here's a quick and dirt video capture (sorry for the very bad quality but I recorded with my phone and left hand...)