[Bf-committers] Replicable Crash in 2.34 with Yafray plugin, and suggestions

Jonathan Merritt bf-committers@blender.org
Sun, 08 Aug 2004 12:02:54 +1000


Charles Wardlaw wrote:

>Also, I think that the XML button should be off by default in Blender,
>and that since Yafray takes a fair sight longer in larger scenes to
>*start* rendering, it might be nice to have a console-ish text bar on
>the side of the render windows.
>

I really like the suggestion of some kind of functionality to allow 
generic feedback from external renderers.  While working on the 
RenderMan export for Tuhopuu, I had begun to work on a system to parse 
progress strings from Aqsis and display those results in Blender, with 
the additional aim of catching ESC key-presses from Blender and killing 
the renderer process when they were received.  This would have allowed 
Blender to remain "alive" to some extent while the renderer is at work.

While I think you're correct that this is fairly simple conceptually, I 
found it was quite difficult to sort out all the details and so 
abandoned the idea for more pressing issues.  What we need is someone 
familiar with the correct way of launching a process which can run in 
parallel with Blender (across platforms mind you!) and reading back the 
output from that process.  The inter-process communication must all 
happen in parallel with the normal event loop so that the Blender 
display remains live.  I know that all sounds simple, but in my brief 
experience it was a nasty mess!

Jonathan Merritt.