ANARI simplifies the development of portable 3D visualization applications
Few days ago Khronos, unveiled by posting the release of ANARI 1.0, which defines an API for cross-platform rendering engines and aims to unify programming interfaces for data visualization.
ANARI is positioned as the first independent 3D rendering engine API which has broad industry support from scientific visualization developers with integration into leading open source applications including VMD, VTK/ParaView and VisIt.
On ANARI, it is detailed that it provides a C-API (C99) with type-safe bindings in C++ code to create hierarchical object trees in memory to fully represent a 3D scene, 3D surface geometry, and volumetric data.
Within main functions of ANARI, highlights the plugin compatibility to extend the functionality of rendering engines, as well as the power receive information about scene update in asynchronous mode, efficient work with arrays in zero copy mode (without allocating additional memory, using only the initially provided buffer), as well as support for rendering tools in interactive mode that are provided.
It is mentioned in the Khronos post that ANARI anda has been implemented by both AMD, Intel and NVIDIA, which have already prepared implementations for their rendering engines to be compatible with the standard, in addition to providing access to their RadeonProRender, OSPRay and VisRTX rendering engines.
In addition, it is mentioned that The new specification is expected to greatly simplify application development. Visualize scientific data. That is why ANARI provides high-level functionality out of the box for creating 3D scenes in memory, eliminating the need to write low-level graphics code.
“Historically, visualization applications required custom-written renderers, but rapid advances in rendering algorithms, hardware, and associated low-level GPU APIs have made it increasingly difficult for domain experts to keep up. modern rendering methods,” said Jefferson Amstutz , ANARI Working Group Chair and Senior Software Engineer at NVIDIA.
Applications that support ANARI can work with any rendering engine that provides this API. The specification was developed in accordance with the principles of building open standards and takes into account the wishes of the community (for example, in response to community suggestions, support for the glTF format was added to use materials based on in the physical representation).
“As a result of a three-year effort of leading industry experts working together on Khronos, ANARI now simplifies the development of portable 3D visualization applications using back-end engines to access next-generation rendering. We thank the scientific visualization community for their invaluable assistance in refining ANARI's design, and are now excited to see how other application domains take advantage of the industry's first ecosystem and vendor-agnostic rendering engine API."
Finally, it should be mentioned that currently an open SDK is already offered for development of applications, which includes back-end layers that implement common functions, such as parameter handling or object lifetimes, a Python-based conformance test suite.
As well there is a trial Blender ANARI plugin of concept in the ANARI SDK and NVIDIA's ANARI-USD implementation that allows any ANARI application to generate results in USD for use on the Omniverse platform and as already mentioned ANARI support is integrated into the visualization packages open source VMD, VTK/ParaView and VisIt.
If you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details in the following link