When I watch 3D graphic screensavers, I know that for some of my work the pedantic rendering of Blender must be overkill. The results are beautiful but they are slow… compared to what the specialized hardware on a video card (fast, but out of reach) can obviously do.
The trick is that I need to be able to get those frames onto a DVD.
I want hardware-assisted rendering.
Is that possible? If so, how?
P.S. It doesn’t necessarily have to be open-source or “free.”
Too much of hardware rendering is “mushy” and varies from card to card. That’s why you can never really have a hardware renderer that works on more than a small, carefully tuned subset of graphics cards.
Well, I should never say never, but it does seem unlikely that any company would make the tremendous investment in tuning software for the vagaries of drivers and hardware that they don’t control, which would be necessary to standardize results over many card-types.
In the case of gelato, nvidia chose only to deal with what they controlled. I don’t know how many cards Maya’s solution works with (though I know they have one)
I think what you want is not necessarily hardware rendering, but rather the recording of realtime 3D output from the game-engine or the like. One program that can do is is FRAPS, a realtime capture software.