Ribelato-1.0.0.24 Available
You should all be aware that a new version of "Ribelato" has been posted to Ribelato 1.0.0.24 at the RMR. The most significant thing about this new version is that it incorporates some changes that users contributed that implement the RIB quadric commands -- Cylinder, Torus, Hyperboloid, Paraboloid, Disk, Cone. Previously, these were ignored by the RIB reader, but now they cause the right-shaped NURBS to be sent to Gelato.
In case anybody's really behind the times, Ribelato is a free, open-source plug-in for Gelato (specifically, what we call a 'generator' plug-in) that can directly read RIB files. Generator plug-ins are a great feature of Gelato. Unlike other renderers that must have scene input in a single format, Gelato does not have any "preferred" scene format. Instead, it has plug-ins that read scene files (or do anything else to generate geometry procedurally or otherwise. Our "Pyg" (Python for Gelato) reader is a plugin of this type -- there's nothing in the Gelato "core" that understands Python. Similarly, Ribelato is a RIB-reading plugin. It's not translating RIB to Pyg, it's reading the RIB and directly making Gelato API calls internally. There's no loss of efficiency. You can write your own generator plugins for any format you like.
Speaking of which, it is possible to translate any format (including RIB) for which you have a generator plugin handy, into Pyg. Just use the 'topyg' utility. For example, if you have a file foo.rib and have installed RIbelato correctly, you can
topyg foo.rib > foo.pyg
And through the magic of generator plugins, this just works automagically.
