CompuServe Thread

Hello again. I have been away for a long time. We are getting ready to revamp some of our IPAS routines and I have a few requests which came to mind for future releases of 3DS. I appologize for my lack of knowledge of IPAS 4. I have the development kit but I haven't had much time to play with it. All of our IPAS work was with IPAS 3. If you recal, us VRex guys created an IPAS routine to place stereoscopic camera pairs along side a normal camera. All of the shifting, rotating, FOV calculations are taken care of to create cool 3-D stereoscopic images. The draw back is that you must render the right and left views seperately and then run a seperate program to multiplex the images into our stereoscopic format. What I would like to do is to modify 3DS with an IPAS routine which would render our stereoscopic format directly. I am looking for a "camera IPAS" structure which gives me access to camera data during a rendering. Ideally, I would like to have my routine invoked when a rendering is initiated. My routine would be able to reposition the viewing pyramid, etc. and initiate two renderings and composite the resultant images. This is very similar to what happens with the field rendering mode where one field is interpolated between the neighboring keyframes. Our stereoscopic format is basically one field for the left image and one field for the right image. If I could write a routine which could replace the camera orientation calculations used for the field rendering mode, I would be set. Another request that I have is to allow for off-axis renderings. I am trying to render images for a six screen 360 degree display. This display allows one to look around in a full circle to experience an environment – similar to Circle Vision or the 360 theater of IWerks. I would like to be able to render an image which is designed to be viewed off-axis. This capability would also help our stereoscopic camera above. My final request would be to allow the size of the image buffer in VP to be modified. I would like to be able to have my IPAS routine receive a buffer, process the image, delete the buffer, create a new buffer of a different size, and then pass it on to the next set of routines in the VP list. I don't know if IPAS 4 can do this already. If possible, could you pass my requests onto who ever should receive them. I would be most appriciative. Also, if you know of any quick fixes to the above requests, I would be anxious to hear of them. It would be great if I could have a 3DS patch which would allow me to replace the field rendering mode calculations.