[Bf-committers] Render Plugin Development

[Matt Ebb]

On 8/16/07, Campbell Barton <cbarton at metavr.com> wrote:
>
> spec/diffuse color, ref,
>   hardness etc - that would be stored in most render-plugin-material's


I agree with you that the more conversion and compatibility the better.

But even in that example it's not that simple, that's a bit of a
Blender/scanline-centric approach :) Take yafaray for example (correct me if
I'm wrong Mathais), it doesn't have spec colours or shading or anything like
that, the surface is treated as somewhere on a range between perfectly
specular (i.e. glossy and shiny) or perfectly diffuse, and in the range
between you get sharp reflections becoming blurrier and blurrier until the
light hitting the surface is being sampled from all around it.

To take this example even further, say there's no separate materials you
decide to use Blender's spec hardness value as an analog for yafaray's
glossiness value, which wouldn't be an unreasonable thing to do. Then some
idiot comes along and decides to add blurry reflections to Blender's
internal renderer. What do you do then? If you keep on reusing hardness for
yafray's glossiness value, even though it means that if people are rendering
materials in Blender with blurry reflections, that won't convert over when
they use that material in yafray, and they'll get a vastly different result.

If you're just converting behind the scenes, you can change the render-time
conversion to use the new glossy parameters in the Blender Material, and
automagically, the yafray renders look the same as the Blender renders,
keeping that common standard of visual compatibility. I think it's much less
confusing this way for users and coders alike.

cheers,

Matt
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