Re: Misc: Applications of small floating point formats.

On 8/2/2024 1:43 AM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Fri, 2 Aug 2024 00:47:56 -0500, BGB wrote:
 

There are shadows, but given there are not any obvious gradients in
the shadows; they could likely have been pulled off using the
stencil buffer.

 There are offline renderers that are built on similar principles to
video-game engines. That’s not the same as using OpenGL for offscreen
rendering.
 I know because I did some experiments along these lines when I was
learning Android programming. OpenGL engines tend not to prioritize
efficient retrieval of rendered images back into program-local
offscreen buffers.
 

For batch rendering, it doesn't really need to be efficient though.
General strategy would be to setup a context, render to the context, and then fetch the rendered image using glReadPixels or similar.
The "glReadPixels()" function is not exactly new...
There is nothing in particular stopping one from using OpenGL for offline rendering in this way.
Granted, on Windows and similar, with GLW the rendering context is generally tied to a Windows Device Context. This need not be the case "in general" (though, I am not sure about the specifics of SGI's implementation in this area).

Slightly older, same company:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfT2MaaukrQ&list=PLV4Ztn9euy7TJJrTgY5jgswEo_GY0ZHqj
>
The show is ReBoot...

 I think, back in those early days, OpenGL was seriously considered for
use as an offline rendering engine.
 Not any more, though.

Doesn't mean it wasn't used, though granted I can't really find much that I can confirm much past the mid 2000s (and this sort of stuff isn't really well documented for various software and TV shows).
It appears to have been not that uncommon though in the mid to late 1990s, in any case.
And, it seems like these shows were operating well within the limits imposed by the fixed-function rendering.
Though, if anything, OpenGL should be more useful now than it was then, for example, due to the existence of things like shaders.
Granted, a lot of more cinematic use (such as the Pixar movies) was pretty much exclusively raytracing (as was the RenderMan software).
And, as can be noted, Maya + Mental Ray also appears to have been popular.
But, not everything was going this route, as a lot of the "Mainframe Entertainment" shows seem to demonstrate.
Though, FWIW, this was the same guys that apparently made the "Money for Nothing" video in the 1980s.
Apparently, some vestige of the company has reappeared, seemingly bringing things like "Cocomelon" upon the world...
Dunno what technology they are using now.
I guess, for a while, there was a time when Adobe Flash was being used to make TV shows. For, example, "Wakfu".
Well, and had also seen some stuff which had apparently been animated by getting really clever with "Microsoft PowerPoint".
Once tried to do something vaguely similar in "Open Office Presenter", but couldn't get quite the same effect (getting things to follow user-defined paths and auto-advancing slides on a timer was seemingly lacking IIRC).
...