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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

That about page doesn't help at all.

> Taichi is an open-source computer graphics library with implementations of 40+ graphics papers. It has a hybrid design: a C++14 kernel part, and a user-friendly Python 3 wrapper.

That's the extent of the information on that page.

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The gallery of rendered images and videos is probably the quickest way of getting an idea of what this software project can achieve:

http://taichi.graphics/gallery/

Doesn't answer the questions I had. Is this real-time or batch rendered? Also, the site advertises it as a "computer graphics library" but many of these demos are more about physics simulation, which only adds more confusion...

Physics simulation is a very active computer graphics research topic (see e.g. the SIGGRAPH conference). The goal in computer graphics research will not be to have an exact result, but to have a visually plausible (and pleasing) result as fast as possible.

Yes, I know. But such libraries often call themselves "physics simulation libraries." The term "computer graphics" is typically reserved for rendering. So what is this library doing? The scene setup and rendering? The offline rasterization? The frame-to-frame physical simulations? More than one of the above?

It's a library of complete physically-based simulation and rendering algorithm implementations.

You seem to be assuming that "library" must mean a layer or an API providing certain runtime abstractions or functionality. That's not really what this is. It's more about code reuse and a rationalized core of tools for implementing the various techniques.

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