Direct3D 10 is coming to Tomato.Graphics

Nowadays I’m designing a new programming model of Tomato.Graphics to facilitate more features and functionalities from Direct3D 10. 

I’m struggling not to lose the goal of providing an unified programming model, and to achieve that, dramatic changes are being made to interfaces of Tomato.Graphics.

After this refactoring is done, I’m planning to implement some of my ideas on point-based rendering  exploiting the Direct3D 10 features.

Project Tomato

Last week I’ve just started an open source project named Tomato at CodePlex.

Actually the project was started 3~4 years ago, and at that time I named it a ‘MassiveRender’. It was just a 3D rendering application to conduct some experiments for my point-based rendering research. That application was based on Managed DirectX, and up until now the whole project is still .NET based. As I maintain the project, I decided to develop more generic and powerful graphics rendering engine, and that’s how the project ‘Tomato’ started.

The project is designed with some goals in mind.

• Scientific visualization: some geometrical algorithms including the principal component analysis and moving least squares will be provided for scientific applications.
• Multi-platform: though the current version provides Direct3D9 implementation only, but the overall architecture is designed completely abstracted from the lower-level  layers so that other graphics platforms including Direct3D10 (and XNA possibly) can be provided in the future.
• Flexible rendering passes: renderer can rearrange its rendering passes at run-time. That means one can add a new rendering pass between the passes, or exchange two, all actions on the fly. Furthermore, I’m considering adding more flexibilities such as run-time shader composition.

For now, I’m still having some problems in the current implementation, but those will be fixed soon.