Hi everyone. Nice to be back again after a long vacation from AoI.
I was thinking about a problem at work where we would like some kind of 3D texture in a real-time simulator. So, this brought my mind directly to AoI and its amazing procedural texturing capabilities.
I made some quick searches on the forum and found this old thread http://www.friendlyskies.net/aoiforum/v
php?id=453 and saw it mentioned an idea about solving the problem by writing a plugin, which was actually the idea I had in mind.
So, looking through the documentation about plugin-writing i saw that the plugin can be one of the following types:
Renderers
Modelling Tools
Translators
Textures
Texture Mappings
Image Filters
Procedural Modules
Generic Plugins
Raytracer object factories
Photon source factories
of which I spotted a few types that could apply to the plugin I want to make:
Renderers - We could perhaps make a plugin that renders a specific 3D texture with specified dimensions to a specified binary file
Translators - We could perhaps make a plugin that exports a selected 3D texture to a binary file
Textures - Maybe we need to have a plugin that extends the Texture3D class so that we get access to the data that it supplies.
Generic Plugins -We could do a generic plugin that perhaps could be a combination of the above?
So my question is, what kind of plugin would I make? Maybe the best option is to make a Translator plugin that displays a dialog where you can configure how you want your 3D Texture to be sampled etc, but then I need to have access to the procedural 3D texture so I can feed it position values and retrieve colour values and what not.
Any thoughts?