[Bf-blender-npr] BEER: a possible action plan and request for comments/feedback.

[Ton Roosendaal]

Hi,

To be clear - I really think it's worth having an external project to handle NPR features. Diversity is good, and it then gets much easier for developers to decide their own roadmaps and releases.
But that's really a decision to be done by a team of coders themselves, it's a lot of work and the coder(s) should just really want it (or do it already, and integrate later).

For Blender Internal - on the other hand - there's possibilities still to make NPR features easier to use and (especially) offered with better quality results. I believe that's possible to do fully compliant - by improving Blender's material and/or compositing code in a way that will make Blender just more awesome for everyone (not just for NPR artists).

That's something I'm interested in, but don't have time for now... but I've seen enough proposals and suggestions from Blender artists in this area already, which to some extent made it in the BEER proposal as well.

-Ton-

--------------------------------------------------------
Ton Roosendaal  -  ton at blender.org   -   www.blender.org
Chairman Blender Foundation - Producer Blender Institute
Entrepotdok 57A  -  1018AD Amsterdam  -  The Netherlands



On 31 Oct, 2014, at 12:27, Roberto Maurizzi wrote:

>  
> When I look at the goals and the project's presentation style (we BEER versus rest), with that very narrow focus on doing what already has been decided apparently - it only allows me one advice: just add this to Blender as an independent rendering engine
> 
> Ton, I'm interested in using Blender because I like a lot of its features and how it has been managed during the years.
> I'm interested in NPR for "cartoons and anime" and I'd like to set up an animation company and to use free software in it, because of the advantages this will give me over the competition that can't understand or change or fix the software they're using... but I'm mainly a programmer (it's what I do to pay for food, at least).
> 
> Because of this when I heard about the BEER project (in July this year, if I remember correctly) I offered to help and started to try to understand what everything was about.
> I didn't know very much about how and why everything was thought out or communicated with you, the BF and the other developers... now it's clear there were some serious communication problems.
> 
> A project to gradually improve Blender's render system with better NPR features is welcome too, but it's made clear to me that this is not of "BEER"s interest.
> 
> After I watched the conference's presentation (I live in Abu Dhabi, UAE, and couldn't attend due to work-related complications) it's very clear that you'd prefer to do that, so in my message I wanted to ask you how you'd like to proceed to add easier and more flexible NPR features to Blender in a way that doesn't break anything and is as useful as possible for other users and their needs. I also presented a few ideas about how we could do this and asked if this was ok for you or not. It's quite likely that different and better solutions could be available and even easy to see for someone that knows Blender's code and architecture very well.
> 
> Now, I don't like the idea of creating an external renderer for a number of reasons, including having to find ways to manage data and have features Blender already has, so I'd still prefer to have indications about how to do what you stated in the line above: gradually improve Blender's render system with better NPR (and not only NPR) features.
> 
> In other words this is an invitation to discuss how you and the BF and other developers think is the best way to go to add render-algorithm level features to Blender, in a way that doesn't force people to "undo" previous rendering steps using nodes or other tricks, because today that's what happens when you try to do things that aren't exactly what the internal renderer do.
> 
> I think we all know that in Open Source sometimes there's a lot of bickering due to different personalities and ways to present ideas, sometimes due to cultural differences in communication.
> You got the impression that in BEER "we" already decided everything, but we're very far from it: there's an idea about what we'd like to have, but still very few good ideas about how to actually go and code it (and I'm speaking as a programmer here).
> 
> I believe that there is a way to understand what everyone wants and needs and find a way to do it that's good for everyone.
> 
> Let me know if you or someone else can help me and the others to better understand what is a good approach to this.
> 
> 
> Roberto
> 
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