[Bf-committers] Render Plugin Development

[Mathias Wein]

Okay, seems we agree ID-Props are essential, before i can't
access them it's almost pointless to write a plugin for the
new yafray code, because pretty much everything gets
stored as ID-Properties.

Campbell Barton wrote:
> Id suggest that custom material types make use of blenders internal data 
> where possible.
> (Matt - maybe this is implied in your proposal, not sure...)
> For example, you have a scene. render in Povray and set the color to 
> just the right color, then decide to try renderman, when changing the 
> material types youd not want to loose the color.
>   
Well, my "scripting department" (Bert Buchholz) strongly voted against
mixing blender settings with external renderer specific ones, and he
pretty much convinced me it is the better way.
If the blender material can't be converted, make a complete and clean
interface for the material type, it is confusing if renderers overwrite
each other's settings, and mappings will become unintuitive if you try
to reuse too many settings, too few will have the same meaning.

The reason is, the new materials in yafray are much more specialized,
which is just necessary for efficient and realistic GI with reasonable
development effort. A one-fits-all material will possibly never exist again.
Lights and cameras don't have identical settings either...it is a pure
raytracer after all, with all the benefits and limitations.

What i do reuse (more or less in lack of an easy alternative) are
blender's texture layers. But mapping of those channels to material
specific ones is unintuitive enough...anyway, i tried to port the texturing
code as good as possible, even though internally everything works
on a custom node system now...so again, the code could do more
than you can access through the blender interface until i get a custom set
of nodes into blender...

--
Mathias (Lynx(3d))