The eigth alpha release of cgkit2 is available at http://cgkit.sourceforge.net
What is it?
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The Python Computer Graphics Kit is an Open Source software package
containing a collection of Python modules, plugins and utilities that
are meant to be useful for any domain where you have to deal with 3D
data of any kind, be it for visualization, creating photorealistic
images, Virtual Reality or even games.
What's new?
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The highlight of this release is the new module "cri" which is a new
ctypes-based RenderMan binding. It allows direct access to a
renderer's shared library that implements the RenderMan API. This has
a number of advantages over the old "ri" module such as:
- Python code and C/C++ code can be mixed and they can both issue
RenderMan commands into the same stream.
- When data is passed in either as ctypes arrays or numpy arrays, then
there is no data conversion required which increases performance
significantly.
- You can use Python functions wherever C callbacks can be used
(procedurals, filter functions, error handlers)
- You can feed a renderer directly without having to create an
intermediate RIB
The module can be used with any renderer that ships with a shared
library (tested with 3Delight, Aqsis, Pixie). When used with a Python
version prior to 2.5 you need to install ctypes separately as it is
only part of the standard library since v2.5 (note: Maya 2008 and
Houdini 9 ship with Python 2.5 whereas Maya 8.5 still uses Python
2.4).
There is another new module "mayabinary" which allows parsing Maya
Binary (.mb) files. However, decoding the actual data still has to be
done by the user.
Apart from that there have been quite a few smaller fixes and
additions, see the changelog for the full list.
For more information, visit:
http://cgkit.sourceforge.net
- Matthias -