[Bf-committers] Render Plugin Development

[Mathias Wein]

Matt Ebb wrote:
> Take yafaray for example (correct me if I'm wrong Mathais), it doesn't 
> have spec colours or shading or anything like that, the surface is 
> treated as somewhere on a range between perfectly specular ( i.e. 
> glossy and shiny) or perfectly diffuse, and in the range between you 
> get sharp reflections becoming blurrier and blurrier until the light 
> hitting the surface is being sampled from all around it.
Yes that's basically the case, the good old specular highlight is not 
really a valid GI concept. All incoming light is treated equally in the 
new yafray materials (or rather, materials don't even have a way to 
distinguish), that means, if a light source produces glossy specular 
highlights, indirect light will consequently do the same, typically 
referred to as "blurry reflections" or "glossy reflections".
Only when you switch off GI you can have something like specular 
highlights without further reflections being calculated.

>
> Then some idiot comes along and decides to add blurry reflections to 
> Blender's internal renderer. What do you do then?
What a weird hypothetical case... :D
(btw. what's the status of it anyway?)


Mathias