Saving a Z buffer

[Chuck Musciano]

     Forgive my lack of correct terminology in the following.  I am new to
the SGI world.

     I will be writing an application to run on a 4D/50GTB which will be 
rendering an accurate picture of the Earth surrounded by several satellites.
The goal is to produce about 10 frames/sec.  Drawing the Earth is far more
complicated than drawing satellites, and will consume the majority of the
rendering time.  Since the satellites are to be animated in real time, they
will slowly move with respect to the Earth as the application runs.

     This is my question: can I prerender the Earth and save the resulting
image and Z buffer, so that when I need to draw new satellite positions, I
can just load the frame buffer with the bitmap, and the Z buffer with the
Z values?  This way, I only have to render the satellites each iteration, 
but still will get proper clipping.

     The application requires full color displays, and I had planned on using
24 bit color.  I could get away with 8 or 12 bit color maps if that would
influence the rendering speed significantly.  Any comments or suggestions
regarding this solution are appreciated.

Chuck Musciano			ARPA  : chuck at trantor.harris-atd.com
Harris Corporation 		Usenet: ...!uunet!x102a!trantor!chuck
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