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[Feature Suggestion] Lights and 3D Shapes

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Yincognito
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Joined: February 27th, 2015, 2:38 pm
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[Feature Suggestion] Lights and 3D Shapes

Post by Yincognito »

I was wondering while working on my 3D Earth skin, would it be feasible to have lights and 3D shapes (at least the basic ones, like a sphere, a cube, a pyramid or a cylinder) in Rainmeter? Do C++ or C# have "ready-made" libraries / functions / procedures to allow the Rainmeter team to make implementing such things easier, or some external stuff like OpenCL (probably deprecated, to my knowledge) or other 3D able "engine" is required for this? How hard that would be (talking only about basic 3D or material projection, not necessarily "sculpting" irregular 3D shapes)?

I'm asking this because currently I can design my 3D Earth skin to have full 3D capabilities, like showing a 3D sphere with projected materials on it, lighted a certain way, animated by rotations on all 3 axes (i.e. X, Y, and Z), but I have to store a great amount of data in plain images (PNGs, or lately compressed WEBPs occupying 10 times less storage space) for the 2 rotations that Rainmeter can't do, aka around the X and Y axes, with only the rotation around the Z axis directly doable in Rainmeter through the TransformationMatrix or the ImageRotate meter options. If there's any chance that the feature can be implemented in Rainmeter in the foreseeable future, that would save me from dealing with thousand of images and lots of storage space. Even though this is a personal project of mine, others would probably be interested in such capabilities for sure, even though they won't actually need them as much as I do...
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