Geometry Shader Data Structures

This chapter describes the data structures that define a scene in memory. While the scene is constructed using API calls, there is not an API call for all operations that merely write a value into an existing data structure. Instead, the mi_api_*_begin calls return a pointer to the data structure just created and expect the caller to fill in simple parameters. This chapter describes these data structures.

This section discusses every element type in detail. There is one subsection for each element type. Each describes

• the element type (as returned by mi_db_type),
• the C data type of the contents. Some elements are arrays of this type.
• the extra arguments given to the create and resize functions to preallocate variable-sized sections.
• a brief descriptions of the defaults stored by the create function.
• the declaration of the data type, with description.

This chapter describes the data structures used by mental ray 3.x. The data structures for mental ray 2.1 are similar, but lack a number of fields. These fields are marked "".

Copyright © 1986-2007 by mental images GmbH