jesse@ut-emx (Jesse Driver) (09/14/90)
Hello fellow graphics programmers. I would like to take this opportunity
to introduce the Dore' mailing list to people who are not aware of it, and
also specify some goals of having this mailing list.
Dore' is a high quality 3D graphics subroutine library which handles both
interactive realtime and photorealistic rendering applications. For the past
few years portable Dore' source code has been available to academic
institutions for $250 per license. This modest charge helps offset the price
for your manuals, postal charges and hotline service. Dore' has a
much more ambitious goal than most public domain graphics code one might
scarf off the network. It has the ambition of providing a unifying framework
around which graphics experts can wrap their renderers, while still being
easy to use and useful to beginners and other users of graphics technology.
The other advantage Dore' has is a User's Group, which can influence
the future directions of software development within this framework.
I saw Dore' as being a great idea two years ago, and I still do today. A
framework is needed in graphics, as we have seen X-windows and Phigs become
more and more important in our world. Dore' does not try and define all of
graphics as we will know it, just the framework. So we have already seen
people working within this framework porting Dore' to Suns, SGI's, and adding
their own renderers. The people who developed and provided Dore' to the rest
of us made ray tracing accessable to the person who didn't want to write
their own, and connection interfaces for those who did, and provided an
installation guide which was easy, and without bugs (for instance, much
easier than installing X from the MIT distribution in my opinion). There is
a team of professionals supporting Dore', and they truely believe in what
they are doing.
Dore' is object oriented, allowing the the rendering style - gouraud,
ray-tracing, etc.. - to be set independently of the model definition. For
instance, a Renderman renderer could be added as a Dore' renderer. High
level primitives are offered such as spheres , meshes and splines surfaces.
There is still alot of work to be done, such as adding a radiosity
renderer, perhaps creating a 3-D Motif widget from the Generic X-window
Dore' interface, resolving issues as to how object-oriented a graphics
language should be inorder to preserve efficiency. The Dore' team has been
tackling these issues one by one and not allowing Dore' to become lopsided
towards ray-tracing or interactivity, but leaving the framework accessable
to both.
To be added to the list, send mail to dore-request@stardent.com.
The hope is that the Dore' mailing list can serve as a forum for
constructive suggestions on how Dore' can deal with the current issues
in graphics. It can also be a place for complaints, although everyone will
benefit more from the exchange if we try and concentrate on concepts rather
than too many implementation details and trivial gripes. Looking forward
to observing interesting ideas pertaining to controversial graphics issues,
striving to keep graphics technology accessable to us all.
- Jesse Driver
Pres. Dore' User's Group