accessing screen buffer
 

Is it possible to access the OpenGl screen buffer directly within Vizard, or can a plug-in be written to do this? Along with my need for multiple viewpoints, I'd like to be able to get the rendered scene(s) and pipe them to another software program. I need to be able to do this relatively quickly as well. I don't think a screen capture tool like fraps is going to help me in this case...

Hi,

Vizard doesn't have a mechanism to do this, but you should still be able to capture the opengl screen buffer using your own software. Programs like Fraps just monitor the opengl buffer and perform their own operations on it. Try visiting the OpenGL website for resources on this subject, http://www.opengl.org

Thanks for the tip. Would the best method be to use a plug-in with OpenGl code to access the screen buffer?

Hi,

It depends on whether you want to send information back to your script. If you do then a plug-in should work, but if you don't then you could create your own application that accesses the screen buffer. You mentioned that you need to pipe the data to another program, so a plug-in isn't necessary. What would be even faster is if you access the screen buffer within your other program, this way you don't need to send data across processes. Hope this helps.