<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 8/16/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Campbell Barton</b> <<a href="mailto:cbarton@metavr.com">cbarton@metavr.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
spec/diffuse color, ref,<br> hardness etc - that would be stored in most render-plugin-material's</blockquote><div><br>I agree with you that the more conversion and compatibility the better.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.
<br><br>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.
<br><br>cheers,<br><br>Matt<br></div></div>