XRT 1.3.0 released

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Posted: 03 Feb 2012 13:55
Tags: downloads

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OpenImageIO or OIIO (an open source project managed by Larry Gritz, a living legend of the CGI industry) is a library for reading and writing images that is format agnostic — that is, a "client app" doesn't need to know the details about any particular image file formats. Specific formats are managed by DLL/DSO plugins. The list of plugins is already rather impressive and growing (TIFF, JPEG/JFIF, OpenEXR, PNG, HDR/RGBE, Targa, JPEG-2000, DPX, Cineon, FITS, BMP, ICO, RMan Zfile, Softimage PIC, DDS, SGI, PNM/PPM/PGM/PBM, Field3d, WebP). Additionally, a TextureSystem class provides filtered MIP-map texture lookups. Texture reads are handled through a cache mechanism which performs access to vast amounts of image data using only a tiny amount (tens of megabytes at most) of runtime memory.

These features make OIIO a very attractive component to include in any renderer, including mine. Actually, because its design is an improved version of the Gelato specification, it has been quite straightforward to replace XRT image I/O plugins and texturing system. The result is available with this new version in the Downloads page.

Frankly speaking, aside from a much wider access to image file formats, it does not improve XRT a lot for now. Further work is needed to fully take advantage of all enhancements OIIO provides. It has been also an opportunity to remove some dust in the interfaces, to clean up and to complete parts of the implementation. Once again, this looks like "invisible" work for the end user. Visible improvements are left for future releases.

For a complete list of changes, see the change log.

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