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[Manta] Re: What exactly is a "channel"?


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  • From: Abe Stephens < >
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  • Subject: [Manta] Re: What exactly is a "channel"?
  • Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2008 14:26:15 -0600

Channels are a seldom used part of Manta, originally they were intended to provide multiple viewports with cameras and frame buffers over the same scene. Someone at SGI made a four channel demo which displayed a data set from three orthogonal views and one perspective view, besides that I don't think anyone has ever used channels.

The scene object (Manta::Scene) and render stack (ImageTraverser, PixelSampler, Renderer, Camera) are members of the engine instance (MantaInterface), they aren't channel specific.

Creating two channels should allow the scene to be rendered from two different cameras (much of the UI code has never been tested with more than one channel), but multiple MantaInterfaces would need to be created to use different rendering stacks. I've never tested this configuration, but I think it should work. Since the load balancer is part of the render stack, ray tracing wouldn't automatically be load balanced between the two engines.

I'm not sure what you mean specifically by two different rendering algorithms. I have a low overhead implementation of Manta/OpenGL hybrid rendering, if that is what you have in mind.

Abe

On Sep 17, 2008, at 10:20 AM, Li-Ta Lo wrote:

Hi,

What exactly is a channel in Manta? It looks like each channel can
have its own camera and image size. Do they share the same world
object? How about the rendering stack (pixel sampler, renderer etc.)?

Can I achieve the effect of viewing the same scene with two different
point of views (and rendering algorithms) with channel?

Ollie




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