[Bf-committers] From Farsthary another anouncement

[joe]

On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 5:26 PM, Yves Poissant <ypoissant2 at videotron.ca> wrote:

> The way I see it, it might be necessary to keep the current render engine
> and build a new one that would live along the current one and be switchable
> by the user. If the new renderer is enabled, then the materials
> specifications would be compatible with the BRDF concept. Otherwise, the
> current set of material parameters would still be available with all the
> current set of shaders. It is possible to translate most BRDF into legacy CG
> parameters but it would not be reliable to try to translate the old legacy
> CG parameters into physically plausible BRDFs. But as anyone who have tried
> to translate Blender scenes to VRay, Indigo, and such knows, that is life in
> the physically plausible renderers world.
>
> Yves
>

Yeah that's what I figured too.  It seems to me, it'd be better to try
and write a new renderer (from scratch, and complete with it's own
entirely new material infrastructure) and experiment with hacking in
the old material shader system, then try and hack stuff into the old
one.

One thing I'm curious about, is what would a shading language for
BRDF's look like, and if it'd be as flexible as other shading
languages (e.g. GLSL, RSL, etc).

Joe