Integration of tinyRT

Friends of tinySG,

My original plan was to update the website roughly once a month. It has been a long journey since the last update back in September 2009, though.

The time did not just pass by, however. There has been a minor iPhone project as well as a huge amount of work on the tinyRT raytracer and last but not least, a prototype for a MPI-based cluster layer created extremely good results. Now the time has come to put these new features together.

tinyRT migrated it's data structures towards using trt as it's base scene format. It has become pretty fast, already outperforming some commercial raytracers - although many important features are still missing.
The 1st application of tinyRT was to speedup the soft shadow calculations in csgEdit. Using an 8-core machine, the compute time is about 1500x less in average, compared to the scene intersection algorithm used before.

As the image above shows, the old algorithms are still available. The new tinyRT bindings may be loaded and used lazily if libtrt is found in csgEdits installation directory.
Another small, new feature is the quick help system, represented by the blue (i) icons: Moving the mouse cursor above the icon will display a balloon text, explaining the available option. This may not be the most user friendly design, but it is at least a start.

The following image shows tinyRT's soft shadows in action (please ignore the missing alpha channel on some textures for now...). There also is already a viewer plugin for csgEdit that replaces tinySG's OpenGL rendering by the multicore CPU tinyRT raytracer. However, results are not too appealing at this time as tinyRT is shader-based and there have not been too many shaders written so far. But this may lead to another story in the future.

Keep rendering,
Christian