[Bf-funboard] Re: (ton) Nvidia Cg Shaders

[Luke Wenke]

ton wrote:
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In my vision, the Blender 3 project is targeted at fully integrate with
programmable shaders, both for real-time as for 'traditional' rendering.
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That would be awesome! I think in theory, the Nvidia cards should be able to
support practically everything, like environmental maps, motionblur (using
an accumulation buffer, or "FSAA"), high-res shadow maps, particles, blinn
and maybe other Blender shaders, etc...

It would be good if the output of Nvidia cards could look identical to
blender's rendered output (apparently they can use 128-bit floating point
colours or something, etc)... that would mean huge performance improvements
in Blender's rendering times. I mean new video cards will be able to render
Doom 3 at about 30+ frames per second, and that includes totally dynamic
lighting, bump-mapping everywhere, specular highlights, tricubic texture
filtering, etc, at a high resolution. Yet using blender it would take at
least about 10 or 20 seconds to render one frame of that. Of course, the
meshes in 3d games look fairly chunky up close, but you could simply give
the 3d card a more complex model - and it would take longer to render it.
(Rendering could be sped up a bit by using hardware T&L)
Currently in blender there is an icon for rendering things using openGL...
you can even render animations in it (by also holding shift)...

BTW, maybe the Nvidia cards can do wide camera angles properly (I think the
software version of quake had this)... it makes polygons curve, which is
cool. I think the only way you can do that in blender is to use "Panorama".

- Luke.