[Bf-committers] GSoC 2008 application (Freestyle integration) - update

[Maxime Curioni]

Hello,
I want to give you all some feedback on my application. I really wanted to
have it ready for Monday but I hadn't covered everything I had wanted to
look at. Unfortunately, I am still writing it and it won't be ready for a
few days. I expect to release a first draft on Saturday afternoon (UTC).
Sorry for the delay.

I am closely following along the lines of Jean-Luc's suggestions. I have
come to understand that integrating Freestyle won't be as 'simple' as adding
it as an extra renderer like Yafray, but will require a thorough adaptation
of Freestyle's core to Blender's rendering pipeline. So far, I can see the
steps that I'll need to make the integration gradual. I'll need to:
1) Integrate Freestyle first as an external renderer, focusing on supplying
it geometric data and modifying its graphical output commands to match the
one used by Blender
2) Create a new render layer (in the spirit of the edge renderer layer) and
refactor the previous code so that Freestyle can be used as-is in Blender,
as an optional render pass. A lot of Python integration work will have to be
done in that stage and I will get to study Freestyle's code in depth.
3) Separate the three stages of Freestyle's algorithm into distinct modules
within Blender (calculation of models' feature information, operation on the
view map and rendering). An API for style definitions will have to be
defined.
4) Provide ways to interact with these modules graphically: selection of
model features (edit mode?), style definition (Python nodes), rendering
(compositor nodes)
5) Document the style definition API and the user interaction

This is a rough sketch of how I plan to tackle the integration. Of course,
nothing is set in stone. I do not know Blender or Freestyle enough to know
if this is feasible, so I welcome your comments. I also want to apologize to
Kent: unfortunately, it took me a while before I compiled Blender on my
machine and since I am going to finish up my application in the coming days,
I won't have time to work on simple bug fixes.

That's all for now. I'll keep you posted when my first draft is on the GSoC
website. Thanks,
Maxime
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