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[x3d-public] Shaders and Triangles: was dedicated working-group focus on X3D interoperability



Justin;

Throwing in some more canadian pennies in the bowl;

I'll go one step further. It's impossible to use Shaders without the Triangle* nodes. Shaders require direct knowledge of the exact geometry structure coming at them as well as precise control over every aspect of the incoming geometry in order to work. Remove the Triangle nodes and you must also remove Shaders too as they're pointless without them.

We still don't need the *Triangle nodes for shaders. What the browser would
need to recognize in your example, is that it should *not* optimize, and feed
the triangles as encountered.  *that* mapping can be specified, and the browser
certainly would know if a Shader was present, or not. 

While shaders are certainly cool, and my GPUGems books reside within an
elbows reach of me, I doubt whether many on this list would choose to, um,
teach shader programming in high school, for instance.

Shaders are neat, and have their place, but, at the moment, their application
is rather specialized. 

-----------------------------------------------------------
John A. Stewart
Team Leader: Networked Virtual Reality

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