RealityServer Features

Basic Principle

At its most basic level the Compositor is a three step system.

  1. Render
  2. Prepare
  3. Composite

The system allows the results of step 1., the rendering, to be saved to disk and reloaded. This allows you to persist your composites between runs of RealityServer and avoid the need to perform step 1. at all if you have already rendered your scene.

In step 2., preparing the system builds the internal compositing data structures and ensures all data needed to do the compositing is actually loaded and ready to go. This step is only needed once per RealityServer session. The composite data will either be loaded from disk or if in memory from a render it will be used directly.

The final stage, step 3. compositing is where you actually output an image. In this step you provide a set of tinting operations to perform which will modify the components of the originally rendered image before combining them. For example changing the diffuse reflection colour of a particular object.

Keep these basic stages in mind when reviewing this documentation. Each step is largely independent of one another however you must always progress in the order specified, even if omitting steps.