[Bf-committers] Revamped material system for 2.37?

[joeedh]

Hi.  One thing I've been wondering is if whether or not Blender's 
shading system will be revamped during the next development cycle.

I'm currently developing an "example" (meant only to generate ideas)  
implementation of a more flexible shading system (with Python support) 
and I'd like to know when would be a good time to start up a discussing 
on this topic.

Also, I hacked in a normal diffuse shader that let's you save normal 
maps.  I made it so diffuse shaders can return a three-part RGB 
intensity array, rather then just a single-float value (which means that 
the normal-map function only modifies the current diffuse color). 

This is actually going to be in the example shader implementation, I'm 
exploring how well Blender's current shading philosophy would actually 
work in a custom-shading environment, but with that one modification 
(diffuse and specular functions both return RGB intensity values).

joeedh