22 Jan
2003
22 Jan
'03
11:28 a.m.
On Wed, Jan 22, 2003 at 02:06:20PM +0000, Steve Harris wrote:
On Wed, Jan 22, 2003 at 01:50:40 +0100, Robert Jonsson
wrote:
The knob in question was rendered in several
frames such that it could
turn a complete revolution, which unfortunately takes lots of memory :(
so I'm not so sure these types of graphics are really usable...
They are. I have a 40ish step photographed (tripod + careful lighting)
knob that I'm using for some UI code and it is perfectly reasonably
efficient. Post processing the photos was very tedious though, and I think
blender would give better results if I had the skills or time to use it.
Something I've been thinking of recently is
palming off the rendering to
OpenGL, modern cards have large texture memories so they can hold most of
the graphics on the card, and not need to bother the main RAM.
On top of that, you'd also have rotation and scaling with very little CPU
overhead so you don't even have to bother providing several frames of your
knobs, while getting higher precision.
Also one has things like QGLWidget in QT and I'm sure there are similar
constructs in the other major gui-toolkits.
Maybe one could start a project to create a library of 'standard' widgets
(knobs, faders, waveform viewers etc.) for the different toolkits, they
could be easily customised by providing different textures...
The only problem I see is that some video cards still don't have 3D
accelerated drivers...
Christian Henz