| Submitted by , posted on 16 September 2004 |

Image Description, by Since the last 'image of the day' of Muli3D in April the library has undergone a lot of changes - new features have been added, performance has been optimized and new sample-applications are available: Muli3D is a platform-independent software-rendering library, which is available from SourceForge under the LGPL license. It reimplements a typical graphic-card's pipeline in software including support for vertex- and pixel shaders, render-to-texture operations and texture sampling.
Some of its features in detail:
- Muli3D supports three triangle-subdivision modes: Simple-subdivision splits triangles recursivly a user-defined number of times. Smooth-subdivison (see screenshot in the upper right corner) is a simplified implementation of ATI's TruForm: Triangles are recursively subdivided and their vertices are slightly offset to generate a smoother-silhouette. The adaptive-subdivision mode splits triangles until the screen-space area of a single triangle falls below a user-defined threshold. All modes have one thing in common: For each newly generated vertex the vertex-shader is called, which allows the implementation of displacement mapping (see large screenshot) through texture-sampling in vertex-shaders.
- Muli3D's textures are completely floating-point-based with formats ranging from single float up to 4 floats per texel. Standard filtering modes (nearest, bilinear, trilinear for mipmapping) are supported and texture addressing allows wrapping and clamping. Textures are used in a very versatile fashion: A texture can serve as standard input to vertex- and pixel shaders for sampling, but it can also be used as the colorbuffer or the depthbuffer in a rendertarget. Individual faces of cubemaps may be treated as normal 2d textures and can therefore be used for input- and output operations during rendering, too.
For more details visit the Muli3D webpage at http://muli3d.sourceforge.net/

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