[Bf-committers] Official yafray support

[Mathias Wein]

About new features since 2.43, everything that isn't converted to 
polygons on rendering will not be recognized by yafray I guess.
I have to admit that i don't really know anything about the new stuff 
like hair/particles, modifiers, sculpting and whatnot, let alone their 
implementation details. On the technical side I'm still busy with a lot 
of basic stuff, and my artistic ambitions somewhat stagnated since the 
yafray project has been transferred to me anyway...

About the ABI problems, maybe we can find someone to provide MSVC 9.0 
builds and put those on yafray.org. I still use 8.0 if I still do 
windows builds at all, and our 0.0.9 download  is even MSVC 7.1 IIRC.

Giuseppe Ghibò wrote:
> Furthermore there is also an external patch for supporting yafaray. 
> Maybe we should enable yafaray and disable yafray.
> A chance.
>   

Well...the patch is just a makeshift to be able to use the new rendering 
code somehow. It's just as outdated feature-wise as yafray 0.0.9 export 
code, if not worse.

Also, the ABI problems will probably not be completely gone with that 
either, although i only use data types available in C (except bool 
maybe) in the interface functions now, the interface itself is still a 
C++ class with virtual functions. Wrapping it in C would be possible 
though...

But Bert experimented with SWIG generated Python bindings instead, and 
it works quite nicely so it got integrated to our build system. This 
gives us a lot of flexibility in extending the new interface structure, 
since you only have to copy the new python bindings instead of 
recompiling blender...

Until there's some sort of official API specs on both sides, I don't 
think anyone will contribute to a new C(++) integration. Maintaining a 
glue between two constantly changing and pretty non-trivial softwares is 
not a very pleasant job...more like Sisyphus work if you're not very 
familiar with both code bases, and I don't know anyone who is, me included.
But, those APIs may be available not too far in the future. Until then, 
Python will have to do i'm afraid...

regards,
Mathias