Hello,

I recently discovered openRL (http://www.caustic.com/) and was wondering if anyone has experience with it. It is a library for realtime raytracing that takes advantage of the CPU, GPU and other specific acceleration hardware if available. I am also wondering what chances openRL stands to be adopted and become a standard.

My actual thought process about that was: I am using openGL quite extensively (though not for high-end graphics), but need at some point shadows implemented (not necessarily for real-time rendering). This is not urgent, but scheduled for 6-12 months of time, and instead of preparing some major development linked to that, why not directly prepare the terrain for the future with openRL, where shadows would come in for free anyways. So I'd offer the user two options, openGL or openRL for visualization (openGL for real-time, and openRL for offline rendering for movie creation for instance)

Any opinions are welcome!

Spitting out renderman rib files is normally the best bet (since renderman is the closest thing to a standardised offline rendering interface). There are plenty of free prman compliant renderers you could then target.... (eg 3Delight). My 2 cents.....

Thanks for the reply RobTheBloke,

However, I still need to have my algorithms "in the loop", I need to be doing image processing on some rendered images to decide what the next scene configuration would be. I used the term "offline" rather like "non real-time". Or is there a way to feed rib files one-by one and retrieve rendered images one-by-one too?
I also liked the idea to be "almost real-time" with openRL, so that I can adjust colors while seing the changes.

Cheers!

I've just discovered this too, and I'm surprised to find only 1 thread on all of gamedev forums about it.

Is there really nothing that can be said about it or its potential future?

Here's a link to some of their docs. It doesn't look that bad.

[url="http://caustic.com/HTMLDocs/Tutorial/Tutorial.html"]OpenRT Tutorial[/url]

OpenRT Examples