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<TITLE>Off-screen Rendering</TITLE>

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<H1>Off-screen Rendering</H1>


<p>
Mesa 1.2.4 introduced off-screen rendering, a facility for generating
3-D imagery without having to open a window on your display.  Mesa's
simple off-screen rendering interface is completely operating system
and window system independent so programs which use off-screen
rendering should be very portable.  This feature effectively
enables you to use Mesa as an off-line, batch-oriented renderer.
</p>
<p>
The "OSMesa" API provides 3 functions for making off-screen
renderings: OSMesaCreateContext(), OSMesaMakeCurrent(), and
OSMesaDestroyContext().  See the Mesa/include/GL/osmesa.h header for
more information.  See the demos/osdemo.c file for an example program.
There is no facility for writing images to files.  That's up to you.
</p>
<p>
If you want to generate large images (larger than 1280x1024) you'll
have to edit the src/config.h file to change MAX_WIDTH and MAX_HEIGHT
then recompile Mesa.  Image size should only be limited by available
memory.
</p>


<H2>Deep color channels</H2>

<p>
   For some applications 8-bit color channels don't have sufficient
   accuracy (film and IBR, for example).  If you're in this situation
   you'll be happy to know that Mesa supports 16-bit and 32-bit color
   channels through the OSMesa interface.  When using 16-bit channels,
   channels are GLushorts and RGBA pixels occupy 8 bytes.  When using 32-bit
   channels, channels are GLfloats and RGBA pixels occupy 16 bytes.
</p>
<p>
   To build Mesa/OSMesa with 16-bit color channels:
<pre>
      make realclean
      make linux-osmesa16
</pre>

   For 32-bit channels:
<pre>
      make realclean
      make linux-osmesa32
</pre>

<p>
You'll wind up with a library named libOSMesa16.so or libOSMesa32.so.
</p>

<p>
If you need to compile on a non-Linux platform, copy Mesa/configs/linux-osmesa16
to a new config file and edit it as needed.  Then, add the new config name to
the top-level Makefile.  Send a patch to the Mesa developers too, if you're
inclined.
</p>

<p>
BE WARNED: 16 and 32-bit channel support has not been exhaustively
tested and there may be some bugs.  However, a number of people have
been using this feature successfully so it can't be too broken.
</p>


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