[Bf-committers] Shading System Proposals

[Raul Fernandez Hernandez]

Hi :)

 +1 for me, my early experiments in unbiasing Render Internal with
pathtracing, and also Final gathering clearly shows the limitations of
the current shading system and prevent advaced rendering techniques and
scalability without a bunch of hack.
  With the new proposal everything will be relatively trivial to implement.

  The PBRT book and the Luxrender project are excelent references also
along with mantra.
  I have an especial question: I haven't see in the proposals the Sampler
structure, wich should be the heart of the new pippeline, it provides
the foundation of every aspect of it, from BxDFs (even for evaluating
multilayered/compound BxDFs ), Integrators, ligths, texturing, camera,
etc.

 Having the sampler independent from those components will allow the use
of efficient/smart sampling strategies in the whole Render internal.

 Also as the render gain in complex features and phisically based ones,
render times could increase and the cost of tweaks do the same for that
reason I think the system should support flexible Deep Render Buffer
(output and store not just RGBA values but any data structures/values) 
that way, for example, storing for each pixel the whole ray tree with
surface normal/color values will allow at postprocessing interactivelly
change the material/texture properties without rerender the scene.

             I would like to contribute to this development, so count on
me, though with the heavy pieces of this chess in movement I
don't think a pawn could do much :)

                                       All the best   Farsthary