RealDeal opened this issue on Apr 20, 2004 ยท 35 posts
stewer posted Wed, 21 April 2004 at 10:35 AM
Rendering on 3d cards is going to come, sooner or later. Gelato looks very interesting, but is too expensive for the private user (both the software license and the required hardware). There are already proof-of-concept demos of photon mapping and ray tracing on the latest consumer grade nVidia and ATI cards, and it's just a matter of time until we see shipping products that use these cards for parts of the rendering pipeline. For example, have a look at the open source Pixie renderer that can use an OpenGL card to do micropolygon hiding in the hardware. If you want to give it a try, Pixie is RenderMan compliant so it should be possible to use it with Poser's built-in RIB export or my PoserMan exporter.