[Bf-committers] From Farsthary another anouncement

[Yves Poissant]

From: "Matt Ebb" <matt at mke3.net>
Sent: Wednesday, February 04, 2009 6:25 PM

> Having more specific material types can be very helpful for other
> things too. Originally in Blender all you could render were solid
> materials anyway, so it didn't really matter, but right now Blender's
> material is a real mess, jumbled up with hacks and additions that have
> aggregated over the years. It's always a lot of clicking and messing
> around to do even the most basic things, since you have to set the
> entire material up from scratch every time. It makes it quite
> difficult for people who aren't experienced with the system to get
> good results since they haven't accumulated the knowledge of which are
> the magic buttons to press and magic settings to use if it's even
> possible to achieve at all in the one-size-fits-all system (trivia Q:
> who here knows the right combination of sliders to get a basic,
> correct looking glass in Blender atm? is it even possible?). Not only
> is it cumbersome in terms of manual labour required, but it also makes
> it much more confusing to use, especially when depending on what
> you're doing, all the other settings (that aren't necessarily relevant
> or work at all in that context) still hang around.

I like this description. This is very similar situation in about every 
rendering pipeline today. A lot of human efforts are put into getting the 
look right. First by trying to tweak the multitude of material and light 
knobs around, even adding yet more specialized knobs. And then, because this 
invariably fail, by rendering in multitude of  layers and trying to force 
the look through the use of a compositor and a lot of labor. The SFX and 
entertainment industry if filled with rows after rows of specialist who 
tweak ad vitam eternam this and that until the magic recipie is found that 
makes the render look right.

In an industry I know well, it is not uncommon to have a team of two people 
working for one or two weeks to tweak the look of a final render so the 
client is impressed. The time it takes to setup the scene is minuscule 
compared to the time it takes to get that "impressive" look.

Physically plausible materials dramatically reduce the tweaking time.

The problem is that a lot of jobs depends on the current insane pipeline so 
that won't disapear tomorrow.

Yves