Horde3D

Hi,

Seems like one of the problems for creating a 3D rendering engine is the fact that every 3D content creation software package has it's own code.
If you could use the free Collada *.dae which supports physics bones and all the other stuff and most 3D applications export to this file format, it would be possible to develop a cross platform (3ds max, maya lightwave, softimage, cinema4d, etc..) The CUDA powered GPU could power that render the image or hdr or video files. It would be cool if you also could asign HLSL or CG shaders to the objects and if it would feature instancing (cloning the same object or animation sequence a thousand times.) Hair and fur would also be nice. RPF or z-buffer and ambient occlusion renderings and a layer system could be good.
Raytracing is not a requested option for me.You can ad Ageia physics later

I recently saw the amazing power of Nvidia CUDA. It would be cool if Horde3D could be also used as a 3D rendering engine for generation 3D animation movies. Perhaps you can team up with the Blender3D.org to provide a CUDA GPU accelerated 3D rendering engine for games and animated feature movies.

I didn't get the point

Physics is nothing Horde3D will integrate, since it is a rendering engine, and we are already using Collada as an input format (although not directly but with a conversion step)... can you explain a bit more, what exactly you wanted to tell us?

Well, It's very easy. Since computergames are becoming more realistic. It would be a good thing to use the render engine which runs on Directx or Opengl and which is hardware accelerated by the gpu to render out animated feature movies.

People always think of renderfarms as large computernetworks, but by adjusting the engine so with nvidia cuda it would allow you to do realistic renderings on a system with 4 sli enabled gpu (nvidia quadro cards). A game engine is programmable, so if you would like to do something like crowd simulation (massive marching soldiers like in Lord of the rings ) this could be much more easier done in a game engine (by using artificial intelligence scripting) then with a traditional render engine. You could also use level of detail meshes (high res meshes when the camera is close and low res when the camera is far away.) this renders much faster the animation. Scripting a render engine is really powerfull.

It would allow me to use a smaller computer setup to do realistic renderings for animations.

Some 3d content creating software like 3ds max is using Havok as their physics engine (havok is also used for computergames by the way. ) So if they need to calculate gravity they use Havok as their physics engine. Nvidia recently purchased Ageia Physics and are now integrating them into their gpu. So realtime physics can now be calculated by the gpu. This means you can calculate almost any effect with the gpu acceleration. THIS MEANS SMALLER CUDA QUADROFX BASED RENDERFARMS.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/nvidia_physx.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiIfSCuwiQw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU0fa8FUugg

As already mentioned, Physics won't be part of Horde3D, and concerning the realistic rendering, feel free to develop shaders that do the rendering as realistic as possible.

Horde is (and will remain) a pure rendering module and takes care of the visual output, even if other things can be simulated on the GPU/stream processor. But Horde can be combined with a physics engine on a game engine level, so you can use it as part of your game engine.