Hi! I'm one of the developers working on the PrettyPoly 3D modeller (http://prettypoly.sourceforge.net) and we have been talking about building a 3D texture painting system into our tool. However, realising that I don't want to write yet another paint program - and knowing that I couldn't come close to doing something as nice as GIMP, it occurs to me that a better approach might be this: 1) Write a plugin for PrettyPoly that captures the 3D coordinate of the cursor - figures out which texel in the texture map it's pointing at and stuffs that into a little chunk of shared memory. 2) Write a plugin for GIMP that grabs that texel coordinate and (somehow) stuffs it into GIMP so that GIMP thinks it's the current mouse position within the painting area. 3) Have that same GIMP plugin grab the current image and dump it into a (large) shared memory area. 4) Have a PrettyPoly plugin read that shared memory and stuff it into the currently selected texture map. Repeating that process (with some more sophistication) should make it appear as if all of GIMP's painting features were working inside of PrettyPoly - with the current image wrapped around a pretzel - or whatever we happen to be painting at the time. You'd also (hopefully) be able to paint directly on the GIMP canvas and see the effect happen instantly on the 3D model. Anyway, knowing ZERO about writing GIMP plugins, I don't really want to launch into a long GIMP-plugin learning curve only to discover that (for some arcane reason) this is utterly impossible - or otherwise stupid. So my question is - Can any of you GIMP guru's tell me if this is basically feasible...or if there is a better way? I'd want to be as close to the 'surface' of GIMP as possible - I'd like to see the result of all the layer compositing, I'd like to see the selection 'marching ants'...everything - I'd like to drive GIMP up close to where the mouse coordinates hit the canvas so that ALL of GIMP's power would be accessible through this mechanism. However, if that's not possible, I'd settle for seeing just one layer...etc. We may take it as read that there is no problem at the PrettyPoly end of the link. ---- Science being insufficient - neither ancient protein species deficient. Steve Baker (817)619-2657 (Vox/Vox-Mail) L3Com/Link Simulation & Training (817)619-2466 (Fax) Work: sjbaker@xxxxxxxx http://www.link.com Home: sjbaker1@xxxxxxxxxxx http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
