The Khronos Group, which develops graphics standards, has published the ANARI 1.0 standard (Analytic Rendering Interface), defining an API for cross-platform rendering engines and aimed at unifying software interfaces for data visualization. Rendering engine implementations supporting the ANARI standard have already been prepared by companies like AMD (RadeonProRenderANARI), Intel (anari-ospray), and NVIDIA (VisRTX). Also published are an open SDK for application development, an ANARI-compatible plugin for Blender, and a scene generator in USD format. ANARI support is integrated into open visualization packages like VMD, VTK/ParaView, and VisIt.
The new specification is expected to significantly simplify the development of applications performing scientific data visualization. ANARI provides ready-to-use high-level functionality for building 3D scenes in memory, allowing developers to avoid writing low-level graphics code. Applications that support ANARI can work with any rendering engines that provide this API. The specification has been developed following open standards principles and considers community feedback (for example, support for the glTF format for using physically based rendering materials has been added in response to community proposals).
ANARI provides a C-API (C99) with bindings for safe type handling in C++ code, allowing for the creation of hierarchical object trees in memory to fully represent 3D scenes, three-dimensional surface geometry, and volumetric data. Capabilities include support for extensions to enhance rendering engine functionality, obtaining scene update information asynchronously, efficient memory handling in zero-copy mode (without allocating additional memory, using only the initially provided buffer), and tools for interactive visualization.
Source: opennet.ru
