The Nodal Scene Interface (NSI) is a simple yet expressive API to describe a scene to a renderer. From geometry declaration, to instancing, to attribute inheritance and shader assignments, everything fits in 12  API calls. The following subsection demonstrate how to achieve most common manipulations.

Geometry Creation

Creating geometry nodes is simple. The content of each node is filled using the NSISetAttribute call. 

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SetAttribute "simple polygon"
	"subdivision.scheme" "string" 1 ["catmull-clark"]

Transforming Geometry

In NSI, a geometry is rendered only if connected to scene's root (which has the special handle ".root"). It is possible to directly connect a geometry node (such as the simple polygon above) to scene's root but it wouldn't be very useful. To place/instance geometry anywhere in the 3D world a transform node is used as in the code snippet below.

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const char *k_instance2 = "more translation";
trs[13] += 1.0; /* translate in Y+ */

nsi.Create( k_instance2, "transform" );
nsi.Connect( k_poly_handle, "", k_instance2, "objects" );
nsi.Connect( k_instance2, "", NSI_SCENE_ROOT, "objects" );

/* We know have two instances of the same polygon in the scene */

Assigning Shaders

Shaders are created as any other nodes using the NSICreate API call. They are not assigned directly on geometry but through an intermediate attributes nodes. Having an extra indirection allows for more flexible export as we will see in the following chapters.

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/** We can inline OSL source code directly */
const char *sourcecode = "shader uv() { Ci = emission() * color(u, v, 0); } ";
nsi.Create( "uv", "shader" );
nsi.SetAttribute( "uvshader", NSI::CStringPArg("shadersource", sourcecode) );

/** We can now connect our new shader node into our simple emitter */
nsi.Connect( "uvshader", "Ci", "simplesshader", "Cs" );

Assignment Priorities

Now that we have one mesh instanced twice with the same shader, how do we override the shader of one of the two instances ? It is usual in scene graph APIs to have a hierarchical assignment strategy where the leaf nodes inherit parent attributes. In such scenarios, overriding of attributes is possible only on the child nodes. In our case, the child node has a shader assigned to it. Thankfully, NSI allows you to perform top-down overrides by specifying priories on connections.  We can connect an attribute node, along with its shader, on the instance transform node (FIXME: graph needed here).

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/**
	Create another simple shader node using the standard OSL "emitter" shader.
	User default shader prameters.
*/
nsi.Create( "simpleshader2", "shader" );
nsi.SetAttribute( "simpleshader",
	NSI::CStringPArg("shaderfilename", "emitter") );

const char *k_attributes_override = "attribute override";
nsi.Create( k_attributes_override, "attribute" );

/* Default priiority is 0, so 1 will override */
nsi.Connect( k_simpler_shader2, "", k_attributes_override, "surfaceshaders",
    NSI::IntegerArg( "priority", 1) );

/*
  Connecting the attributes to the second instance transform will
  override the shader below because of higher priority.
*/
nsi.Connect(
	k_attributes_override, "", k_instance2, "geometryattributes" );

Multi-Camera

NSI has a powerful camera description features that allow rendering of multiple points of view at once (as in stereo renders). Moreover, a single camera can be used to render multiple different screens. This is achieved by separating the camera's view description from screen's characteristics such as resolution, crop and shading samples. This means that it is possible to render two different images using the same camera with each image having its own resolution and quality settings.

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