Generic Parametric Shapes

[benjamin-heasly]

Issue by benjamin-heasly Friday Oct 18, 2013 at 15:53 GMT Originally opened as https://github.com/DavidBrainard/RenderToolbox3/issues/41

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It would be useful to have Generic mappings that can convert arbitrary meshes to parametric forms.

For example, to make a sphere with Blender and Collada, the user must create a mesh with many vertices. This can take a lot of space and processing time. But many renderers define an analytic sphere that can be specified with a few parameters.

We could define Generic Parametric Shape mappings that "bless" a mesh with a parametric form, such as sphere or disk. This would reduce the size of renderer-native scene files. It would allow renderers to produce renderings with less computation and higher accuracy.

Processing these mappings would involve a division of labor between RenderToolbox3 and renderer plugins:

• RenderToolbox3 would define fitting procedures that accept a Collada document node, locate vertex data, and return a specification for a particular Parameteric Shape, such as "a sphere with center XYZ and radius R".
• RenderToolbox3 would pass the Parameteric Shape specification to a renderer ApplyMappings function. It would be up to the ApplyMappings function to convert the specification to a renderer-native format.

[benjamin-heasly]

Moving this to RenderToolbox4: https://github.com/RenderToolbox/RenderToolbox4/issues/10