Blender Yafray interoperability (Was: Re: [Bf-funboard] Closer Aqsis integration.)

[Robert Wenzlaff]

On Wednesday 29 October 2003 05:00, Ton Roosendaal wrote:
> Hi,
>
> At the conference, we'll talk with Jandro about how to have Yafray and  
> Blender working smooth together. We won't fully integrate this but can  
> devise a good plugin architecture for it. Alternatively, it can also be  
> done fully in Python.

A thought I had was to add a mode to Yafray to act as a "sample server".
At the beginning of each frame (or on demand once per frame) the scene data 
could be loaded into Yaffray, and then Yaf  holds the data and waits for 
sub-pixel descriptors and returns the sample color.  

The sub-pixel descriptor would only be sent  if a material had a "raytrace" 
attribute set.   Voila, selective raytracing. 

Then if you want the scene globally raytraced, just have a scene attribute 
that overrides the per material one.

Would be a good job for "user data".  Yaf materials could be defined entirely 
in Blender.  Or it could be done via the plugin system (Though I don't know 
if we want plugins having full access to scene data)  Maybe it needs to be a 
comination of a few things. 

It would allow cool things like toonshaded characters in raytraced worlds, or 
Blender's speed on everything except the mirrored ball.

I played around with some early Yafray source trying to get it to render just 
the contributions of the passes greater than 1.  That way we wouldn't have to 
worry about getting the Yafray base colors to match Blender's.  You could add 
Yaf's reflections/refractions to Blender's base shading.  I didn't get too 
far though.

A couple more things to talk to Jandro about, I guess.
-- 
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Robert Wenzlaff                rwenzlaff@soylent-green.com