The following is an outline of a topic discussed at the OpenFlight User Group Meeting I/ITSEC 2009.

We invite your comments…

Problem:

Currently face/mesh nodes contain complete set of visual attributes (color, material, texture, shader etc)

Advantages

-- Simple

-- Flexible

Disadvantages

-- Large file sizes where compression is easily possible

-- Difficult to affect global changes in scene

-- Inefficient runtime render state management

-- OpenGL moving away from immediate mode

Proposed Solution:

Face Attribute Palette

-- Set of color/material/texture/shader combinations

-- Stored in a new “Face Attribute Palette”

-- Assigned by index to geometry

-- Chance to “deprecate” unused face attributes – which attributes?

I like this idea a lot, since it might not only solve problems related to texture switching (another topic of discussion here), but it also introduces a lot more flexibility in modeling different representations of a single piece of geometry.