[Bf-committers] Re: Round 2: OpenEXR in Blender's CVS

[Matthias for Blender]

On Jun 30, 2005, at 4:40 PM, Arne Schmitz wrote:

>>> I played with OpenEXR and when I striped libIlmImf.a ... it is  
>>> "only"
>>> 750 KB size big ;-).
>>>
>>
>> Correct, but it needs some other small extra libs like libIex,  
>> libHalf and
>> libImath. :-)
>>
>
> I think that is not so important. OpenEXR is *so* great, that it  
> should at the
> very least be an compiletime option.

When we introduced EXR at Digital Domain, everybody jumped right at  
it and begged all software developers to put it in every tool  
(internal and external).

The advantages are:
- truly open format
- flexible to support line rendering, bucket rendering, etc.
- can handle huge images
- can handle many depth formats including float and half float (16bit)
- can handle layered images (one of the main reasons for DD and Nuke)

You could write a stub that links a library into Blender at run-time,  
so folks only need to download it if actually required.