[Bf-committers] Blender and Scanline OpenEXR files

[Jeroen Bakker]

Hi all,

I have been working on a project concerning Blender and OpenEXR for 
interchangeability with other software products. To my opinion I have 
detected a flaw to the support of the OpenEXR file format. I would like 
to discuss this.

There are two types of openexr files (scanline and tile). The Tile based 
fileformat is outputted by Blender when selecting OpenEXR as imagetype. 
This file contains color, transparency and optional depth information. 
Also the compression method can be selected. The Scanline based 
fileformat is outputted by blender when selecting MultiLayer as 
imagetype. This file contains all Renderlayer information and is always 
compressed as OPENEXR_ZIP.

The implementation of the Scanline based file is done in the 
render/pipeline.c. The reason for this is that it is used as as optional 
memory optimization between rendering and composing steps. During this 
step the image is saved in the orientation of the blender buffer. The 
blender buffer is bottom scanline first. So the scanline what is shown 
in the bottom of the screen is stored in the file first.

During my research I found out that the scanline OpenEXR fileformat must 
contain a lineOrder attribute (this is stored in the file) but the 
specification of the file format states that the scanline are always 
stored top scanline first.

http://www.openexr.com/openexrfilelayout.pdf
on page five it states: "The block's y coordinate is equal to the pixel 
space y
coordinate of the top scan line in the block. The top scan line block in 
the image is aligned with the top
edge of the data window, that is, the y coordinate of the top scan line 
block is equal to the data window's
minimum y." My intepretation of this is that scanline based OpenEXR 
files are only stored from top to bottom and does not check the value of 
the lineOrder attribute.

All files stored when selecting the MultiLayer option is Blender is 
quite useless when using in other tools than Blender as the file will be 
read upside-down.

Can someone please react to this?

Greetings,
Jeroen