geomview for NeXT

[munzner]

Hi Xin Wei. I met you briefly when I was still at Stanford.

I have no idea how much you know about geomview already, so I'll give
a brief overview to give a context for a specific answer of what I
think you're asking.

Geomview is a 3D viewer that's written on top of the OOGL graphics
libraries (both developed here). In addition to interaction with
precomputed data, geomview also be used as a dynamic display for other
running programs (external modules) and/or have its capabilities
extended through these external modules.  Both geomview and OOGL are
split into device-dependent and device-independent code for ease of
porting.

In geomview for the Iris, the rendering is done with the SGI GL. The
NeXT port uses Quick RenderMan, which as you may know will be bundled
in 3.0. (The other flavor of the OOGL RenderMan port is PhotoRealistic
RenderMan, which is used for the RenderMan snapshots from the SGI
version at the moment.)

Your mail implied that you wanted to look at Objective C classes.
Both geomview and OOGL are written in C at the moment. Obviously the
NeXT version of geomview has some Objective C hooks and a NeXTish user
interface, but all the common code of both geomview and OOGL is shared
between versions. The current release of geomview for the SGI does
contain the PhotoRealistic RenderMan port of the OOGL mg library (the
OOGL library that contains all the device-dependent code).

Knowing this, is looking at the SGI version enough to give you the
head start you want? (Available from via anonymous ftp at geom.umn.edu
in pub/geomview.) 

We're trying to get the NeXT version ready in the next month or two,
but it would take some work we hadn't been planning on doing quite yet
to get it compilable on somebody else's network.

Does this answer your question, or were you getting at something
completely different?

Tamara Munzner          ((555) 555-5555
munzner at geom.umn.edu    The Geometry Center