[Bf-committers] BOAL idea. . something really, really needed

[Ton Roosendaal]

Hi,

You could check on the notes I made to explain the design process for  
Blender. It's on blender3d.org -> InfoCenter -> Development, where you  
can find a lot of goodies.

http://www.blender3d.org/cms/Blender_Architecture.336.0.html

A the time this design happened, CSG was already getting out of the  
picture as outdated. The last true CSG based modeler/renderer (gig 3d)  
disappeared just because it's very hard to work with. But here I talk  
from the 3d animation tool perspective, and based on development as  
reflected in the yearly Siggraph proceedings/conferences.

Nevertheless, the "Meta" object type was also meant to be the primitive  
type in Blender to experiment with CSG structures. There's what you can  
call a "CSG Object".

Having c++ within Blender core, and especially dynamic c++ plugins is  
an architecture proposal which is out of the scope of what we do  
currently. Regular C is still standard, and when you prefer to use C++  
(which is fine) it should be delivered as a library with a C API  
wrapper to interface with the rest of Blender.

I've coded the main object and data system in Blender, and theres  
several aspects in it you could describe as 'horrible mess' yes, but  
that's on a very different level.
Your perception seems to be based on biased opinions on C and  
requirements for a CSG system, which completely - and purposedly -  
conflicts with how it currently works.

-Ton-


On Sunday, Sep 12, 2004, at 03:19 Europe/Amsterdam, joeedh wrote:

> Hi.  Due to the horrible mess of the way Blender handles objects, I  
> have decided to (in my own sources) create a Blender Object  
> Abstraction Layer (BOAL) to use with my new CSG object.
>
> BOAL is a Blender internal C++ library I'm designing that will be able  
> to implement new objects in Blender without breaking SDNA.  This will  
> be implemented as a new object "type" as to avoid messing up Blender.
> Among other things, this could be the start of a General Blender  
> Plugin API, as it would (hopefully) be trivial to modify Blender to  
> allow dynamically loaded Object plug-ins!
>
> So, what do you think?  It'll take me a while to get the exact  
> speifics (there is a LOT of little functions each object class will  
> have to implement, and I have to find all of them. . .*sigh*), so  
> it'll be a while before I can make an actual code-feature proposal.
>
> joeedh
>
> P.S.: And please don't say this is a Blender 3.0 thing. . .the current  
> system is really, really inadequate.
>
>
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>
>
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
--
Ton Roosendaal  Blender Foundation ton at blender.org  
http://www.blender.org