[Bf-committers] Render API follow-up

[Giuseppe Ghibò]

Ton Roosendaal wrote:
> We've discussed a couple of strategies; including a more 'high end' 
> integration, not based on exporting geometry/materials but for example 
> exposing an api to use raytrace calls and visibility info.
> However, what we quickly fell back to was the simple fact that we first 
> should work on a good (re)design of how Blender will tackle rendering 
> in general. This should start with a better way to define own shaders 
> (real shader tree editor, shader language), but also a more advanced 
> interal shading/lighting pipeline, and better methods to handle caching 
> (geometry bucketing, image tiling, shadowbuffer tiling).
> This will, combined with the 2.5 flexibility to extend on Blenders data 
> via RNA, deliver a much better starting point for a future proof design 
> for integration (plugins) or export.
>
>   

Ton, if you plan a big re-design of the renderer(s), try to get it(them)
CUDA-ble (or OpenCL) since the beginning as was already mentioned in
this list some month ago.
Maybe you can borrow some Tesla unit from nvidia... :-) And don't forget
there could be already a cool name for the IRC channel:
#blendercuders... :-)

Bye
Giuseppe.