Re: offscreen rendering with gl-render - pls advice

[Ben Abbott]

On Jan 17, 2010, at 8:28 PM, Michael D Godfrey wrote:

> On 01/17/2010 01:43 PM, Shai Ayal wrote:
>> 1. Is it possible to link different oct files against different versions of 
>> libraties? -- i.e link offscreen_backend.oct to OSMesa and fltk_backend.oct 
>> to the system's GL? That would certainly solve the problem.
>> 2. If not, another possibility is to compile OSMesa so that all OpenGL 
>> functions have the mgl prefix instead of the usual gl prefix (i.e. mglBegin 
>> instead of glBegin). This together with some scripted way to make a 
>> m-prefixed version of gl-render (to be called mgl-render of course!) might 
>> be a solution (all be it a very ugly one).
>> 
>> Does anyone else have any other ideas or recommendations?
>> 
>> Shai
> 
> The mesa3d web page (http://www.mesa3d.org/)
> claims that mesa implements the openGL specification.
> Therefore, is a third possibility to just switch to mesa?  
> 
> The ugliness of option 2 above seems pretty serious.
> It also appears that switching backends for offscreen
> use would tend to lead to confused states.
> 
> The current Mesa 7.6  is part of the base Fedora release.
> 
> Michael

For MacOS X, mesa is available.

$ fink list mesa
Scanning package description files..........
Information about 8047 packages read in 6 seconds.
 i   mesa                               7.0.2-2                    3-D graphics 
library
     mesa-libglw-lesstif                7.2-1                      Xt / Motif 
OpenGL widgets
     mesa-libglw-lesstif-shlibs         7.2-1                      Xt / Motif 
OpenGL widgets
     mesa-libglw-openmotif3             7.2-1                      Xt / Motif 
OpenGL widgets
     mesa-libglw-openmotif3-shlibs      7.2-1                      Xt / Motif 
OpenGL widgets
     mesa-libglw-openmotif4             7.2-1                      Xt / Motif 
OpenGL widgets
     mesa-libglw-openmotif4-shlibs      7.2-1                      Xt / Motif 
OpenGL widgets
 i   mesa-shlibs                        7.0.2-2                    3-D graphics 
library

Some other possibilities are;

(1) use G2PS, and ghostscript for off screen rendering

        http://www.geuz.org/gl2ps/

(2) I'm becoming a fan of pgf/tikz, which would require a latex install to 
render to ps/pdf/etc.

        http://sourceforge.net/projects/pgf/reviews/

Ben