[Bf-committers] [Bf-blender-cvs] SVN commit: /data/svn/bf-blender [12595] trunk/blender/source/blender: * New material option: TexFace Alpha

Matt Ebb matt at mke3.net
Thu Nov 15 13:36:11 CET 2007


On 15/11/2007, at 7:21 PM, Carsten Wartmann wrote:

> But is there a situation where you use alpha images and want to switch
> of alpha? So why not just let TexFace use alpha if there is alpha  
> in the
> image?

Yes, that's how I originally had it for my own work, but I was  
thinking that there's the possibility that people have used images  
with alpha in the past, expecting the alpha not to come through, and  
that changing the behaviour would break old renders.

I'm not sure really how big a deal this is in practice though -  
personally I'd much rather not be adding yet more options for things  
that should 'just work', but it seems that in the past, a lot of care  
has been taken to keep old files rendering similarly, so I stuck with  
that. Personally I think a too-strict adherence to backwards  
compatibilty here can be to Blender's detriment - I'd like to think  
that every now and then we should be able to break compatibility to  
freshen things up in both the render output and usability...

Perhaps at least a good compromise would be to have the Alpha option  
always on by default on new materials, and set it to off by default  
when loading old files.

> Or even better, use the texture face panel option "Alpha" to  
> control on
> which faces you want to use alpha?

It's an interesting thought, but I don't think it's a good idea. The  
software renderer and the game engine OpenGL renderers are entirely  
different beasts, with the exception of texface, which although  
useful, is still pretty dodgy. I think it should be kept that way-  
having to worry about setting the odd game engine face properties as  
well as your materials, in a completely different part of blender,  
would complicate the issue much more. Most people that don't use the  
game engine wouldn't even know that those texture face settings even  
exist. On the technical side, it's also not easy since the software  
renderer doesn't really have any knowledge of the texture face  
settings - it just knows 'renderfaces'.

cheers

Matt

------------------------------------------
Matt Ebb . matt at mke3.net . http://mke3.net



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