ChapterZero

I was trying to get Microview up and running on one of the computers at work, and I had to delve into the world of VTK, I’ve been (re)-developing an interest in visualization and 3d software. Practically speaking, I don’t have much use for them– I am neither an artist, nor do I need visualization software for anything other than the cardiac imaging project– for which we already have Microview. But, I was looking for something cool to do, to have a reason to develop my Pythonic skills.

So far, I’ve looked at VTK, Vpython, Coin and Pivy, and Cgkit. Of these, CGKit is the only one I can get working: VTK, Coin and Pivy require compiling to work, and I can’t figure out how to jump Mingw through the hoops, and my Vpython downloads keep hanging. I managed to get CGKit, and even ran Pixie and Aqsis as renderers using it.

It doesn’t seem to be quite what I’m looking for though, and I’m wondering if anything is. My next download is ayam, going as we speak. I’m looking for an environment that facilitates modeling at the level of complexity of, say 3DSMax, but is also easily and quickly extensible (providing an IDE would be great), and doubles as a viewer.

Some of the things I’d like to work on: weird rendering algorithms (like relativistic or cartoonish rendering), texture and shading algos, and curves and surfaces, terrain layout algos. I just ordered a couple of books on Renderman from the library, it looks like a system worth knowing. Too bad POV-Ray, the only raytracing/modeling system I ever bothered learning, doesn’t have a RI interface.