[Bf-committers] Render Plugin Development
Campbell Barton
cbarton at metavr.com
Wed Aug 15 17:53:26 CEST 2007
Jonathan Merritt wrote:
> Campbell Barton wrote:
>> Can you give an example of why a C render plugin would need to call a
>> python script?
>>
>
> I'd imagine that one use for this could be procedural generation of
> render output.
>
> Current RenderMan engines allow external programs to generate procedural
> geometry. Each time the C render plugin is queried for geometry by the
> RenderMan callback, it would execute the Python script. The script
> would then call functions in the plugin (via an implementation of the
> CGKit interface, for example), to direct it to provide more output to
> the renderer.
>
> I can see this kind of thing being used to provide customized,
> highly-efficient objects which are tightly integrated into both Blender
> and the external renderer. As a case in point, think of the "nail map"
> from the X-Men movie... the one where the little columns moved up and
> down to produce a map of New York. Just as an example, an effect like
> that is simple to implement as RenderMan procedural geometry, but would
> take vast amounts of system resources if you created (and animated!) all
> of the geometry in Blender itself. There are many other examples I can
> think of... custom particle and curve effects, landscape rendering, LOD
> procedurals, etc.
>
> Jonathan Merritt.
>
This still dosnt make sense to me, are you saying the render API should
provide some special function to run a python script? - C can alredy do
this without too much trouble.
--
Campbell J Barton (ideasman42)
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