Quote - I am following this thread with an all-consuming passion, and am incredibly excited by the ideas that are being presented. My own programming ability is limited to VBA (Excel) and (remotely) Foxpro, so I can't say I really understand the development issues of QT (which I understand D|S is written in) vs GTK (The GIMP?)... but since I'm a heavy user of the GIMP and Blender3D and Ubuntu Linux and an avid advocate of the Open Source movement, I applaud the insistence on at least dual OS development... and the underlying philosophy driving this.

I run WindowsXP at this point almost exclusively for Poser 7 - I did try to run Poser in WINE, but the interface issues became too irritating, so I went back to WinXP for Poser. I never get on the Internet in Windows, and do everything non-Poser in Linux. The people at Silo are seeing the handwriting on the wall and are creating a Linux version. This will be the first - and by your proposed ideas - the most comprehensive posing/modeling?/animation/rendering application for any OS out there, and the only one of its kind for Linux. You have my undying, enthusiastic support, RD! If there is anything I can do to help.... I'm here!

Lol.. well, it will be an ongoing project to be certain, but I'm pretty confident that once we get an alpha release and a bit of a following the developer base will expand quickly, allowing us to hopefully start implementing a lot of these features in the first few versions.

It's going to be an interesting project, that's for certain - most newer modelers and the higher end CGI shops use sub division modeling on lower poly meshes with a combination of high end maps to produce the sort of quality images you see in there work.

Poser, on the other hand, uses a much higher poly mesh and much less in the way of shaders/displacement maps.  So one of the big challenges will be to support the Poser way of doing things and yet still provide the higher end, sub-d type structure that most high end CGI operations use.  I think I've got a plan worked out there, in fact it will be a "selectable" flag on each object as to whether or not it uses sub-d, it will be applied as needed to each object in the scene.

A few other hurdles to be overcome of course, GTK offers much better and easier to use GUI builders in the open source area but they are not Mac compatible, at least not yet.  While they are working on a Mac port, it's not 100% ready for prime time.

So if I use GTK that speeds up development for Linux and Windows, but slows it down for the Mac, as I will either have to code a seperate interface for Mac or what until GTK ports to mac so it can run on there systems.

Qt would alleviate this, but there open source gui editor.. wow, ick doesn't even begin to cover it.  They strippd out about 95% of the functionality compared to the commercial version, and really it's only slightly better than building the GUI by hand from what I can see, so I'm really leaning away from QT.

There are other open source alternatives of course, but none that really have the maturity or the types of widgets necessary to build an application of this nature.  So I'll give it some more thought and see what I think the best final solution will be, but it's looking more and more like this will be a GTK app.

-Never fear, RenderDog is near!  Oh wait, is that a chew toy?  Yup. ok, nevermind.. go back to fearing...