[ REQ 6040]: geomview 1.5 -> renderman

[Tobias.Kramer at Colorado.EDU]

Hi, I am using geomview (a great program) and have to use a lot of
spheres. I use a low number vor NDice to speed up the interactive display,
but for publications I want a high resolution picture. The best way would
be to use renderman (but this is a commercial program). However, BMRT is
available
http://www.seas.gwu.edu/student/gritz/bmrt.htm
a  mostly renderman compatible shareware (FREE for noncomercial
use) program (available also for my
GNU/LinuX-System). The problem: Spheres are not represented as spheres in
the renderman file by geomview but as Nurbs or so. Why??? Spheres are
supported by
renderman and the code would be much nicer. Moreover the problem at least
with the last version of BMRT was that the Nurbs produced from geomview
didn't work. So in order to make your nice Renderman Interface available
to everybody please consider to change the sphere-Renderman code to be
compatible with the FREE available BMRT. 
I did NOT check out the latest Version of BMRT (at the moment I dont have
access to unix-workstations) but I found this on the BMRT-home page:
"New version: fixed NURB parameterization". So maybe geomview spheres work
by now. You should check this and add a pointer to BMRT in the FAQ.
I consider this very important, because many want to produce nice
pictures with geomview for publications. So support for a freely available
ray-tracing
program would GREATLY improve geomview for everybody.

Thanks for listening and your great program (and the GNU/LinuX support).
For crystal visualization geomview is extremly helpful and excellent.
If you can, please keep me informed.

Tobias Kramer

e-mail: tobias.kramer at colorado.edu