[Bf-committers] Render Plugin Development

[Campbell Barton]

Mathias Wein wrote:
> Matt Ebb wrote:
>> 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.
> Yes that's basically the case, the good old specular highlight is not 
> really a valid GI concept. All incoming light is treated equally in the 
> new yafray materials (or rather, materials don't even have a way to 
> distinguish), that means, if a light source produces glossy specular 
> highlights, indirect light will consequently do the same, typically 
> referred to as "blurry reflections" or "glossy reflections".
> Only when you switch off GI you can have something like specular 
> highlights without further reflections being calculated.
> 
>> Then some idiot comes along and decides to add blurry reflections to 
>> Blender's internal renderer. What do you do then?
> What a weird hypothetical case... :D
> (btw. what's the status of it anyway?)
> 
> 
> Mathias

Dosnt the argument Matt put forward when converting from blender 
material DNA and render-api-material apply when converting either way?

Just means that...
1) plugin dev's need to be careful how they convert data.
2) if blender changes its DNA, render plugins might need to be updated 
(Id guess these situations wouldn't come up that often, and changes in 
DNA between releases in a materials DNA would not put too much strain on 
the plugin devs)

again, if spec settings are not renevent for some rendering engines, 
they just wont be converted from or too