[Bf-committers] Node API

[Matt Ebb]

Sounds excellent, Lukas.

On Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 9:09 PM, Lukas Tönne <lukas.toenne at googlemail.com>wrote:
>
>   The Cycles render engine already uses C++ node class definitions,
> generated from the internal RNA information, to convert node data from
> the editor into the internal shader graph. At this point, however, the
> node types are still all defined as part of the blender core code,
> instead of being generated as part of the Cycles external system. It
> would be good to have a way of registering node implementations from
> C/C++ the way we can do in bpy.
>

While there will probably need to be something like this for BI nodes,
perhaps as an alternative for C++ support, the cycles nodes could just be
converted to python defined? I don't know if the cycles nodes actually do
anything in blender, I presume they're just inspected and the graph
exported to a cycles representation.

Defining them in python would be better off for the render API in general,
since it would be using the same interfaces as other external renderers. I
realise that cycles has already left that behind with its in-source access,
but imo the more it can be kept as  'official, but just another external
renderer' sharing the same public APIs, the less chance there is of
returning to the bad old days where blender internal was the only game in
town.

cheers

Matt