[Bf-committers] Render Plugin Development

[Campbell Barton]

Mathias Wein wrote:
> 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.

I assume you mean "before you can access them"?
You can edit ID properties from the help menu, as well as in python and 
C. Access isnt pretty right now but if the help menu ID-Props editor is 
too cumbersome you could write your own settings editor in python 
without too much trouble.

> 
> 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.

First of all there would be nothing to stop you doing this since you 
could access both internal settings and ID-Props.

However for basic stuff - like color or lamp energy would be annoying to 
have to re-assign them whenever you switch rendering engines.- Its up to 
you to decide where make use of your own settings and not use blenders.

> 
> 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))