You may wish to write a C or C++ program which makes calls to the procedural interface, resulting in the output of RIB. The resulting RIB may be piped directly to another process (such as a previewer), or redirected to a file for later rendering. The library libribout.a does this. This library provides a `C' language binding for the RenderMan Procedural Interface.

You can link libribout.a in the usual way to your `C' programs which make the various Ri procedure calls. The following example shows how to link with this library on a typical Unix machine:

        cc myprog.c -o myprog -lribout -lm

This will result in an executable, myprog, which outputs RIB requests to standard output. This may be redirected to a specific RIB file as follows:

        myprog > myfile.rib

        RiBegin (RI_NULL);

The default of sending RIB to stdout can be overridden by providing a filename to the RiBegin statement in your program. For example, suppose your program contains the following statement instead:

        RiBegin ("myfile.rib");

In this case, the RIB requests corresponding to the Ri procedure calls will be sent to the file "myfile.rib" rather than to standard output. In addition, if the filename you specify starts with the '|' character, the library will open a pipe to the file specified after the '|' symbol. For example, RiBegin ("|rgl"); will cause the RIB you produce to be piped directly to a running rgl process without creating an intermediate RIB file.

Remember to tell the C compiler where the ri.h and libribout.a files are, or it won't be able to find them.

On most platforms, BMRT is also distributed with a dynamic library, libribout.so (or perhaps libribout.so.2.3.6). This library performs the same function as libribout.so, but is a dynamic library, which means that it is shared by all programs that link against it, rather than being separately copied into every resulting executable needs the library. Please consult the manual pages to your C compiler, or your local system administrator, for the fine points of using dynamic libraries.

This document last updated 27 Aug 98 by gritzl@acm.org

All BMRT components are Copyright 1990-1998 by Larry I. Gritz. All rights reserved.

The RenderMan Interface Procedures and RIB Protocol are: Copyright 1988, 1989, Pixar. All rights reserved. RenderMan is a registered trademark of Pixar.