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QD3D Plug-In Renderer Handlers

Q: I'm writing a QuickDraw 3D plug-in renderer. What handlers must a QD3D plug-in renderer implement?

A: The good news is that plug-in renderers do *not* have to support all the tweleve standard QD3D primitives. Rather, they only need to support:

  • triangle
  • point
  • line
  • marker
  • pixmap marker

However, doing this will force all "high-level" primitives cone, cylinder, mesh, trimesh, polyhedron) to be decomposed into triangles, which will result in some pretty slow rendering. Depending on whether or not the renderer is intended to be interactive or not, this may or may not be a problem.

For interactive use, it would be a really good idea to implement the trimesh and the polyhedron, and perhaps the trigrid (though this is less useful than the other two, and should be considered a lower priority), in that order.

[Jul 11 1997]

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