[Bf-committers] pixel get & image processing

[Domino Marama]

On Tue, 2011-01-25 at 15:44 -0700, Dan Eicher wrote:

> Anyhoo, image data access comes up quite often and the party line it
> seems is to just use ctypes (which doesn't work for our windows
> brethren due to the way msvc exports symbols). Or there's an
> 'unofficial' port of PIL to py3 that works according to Josh (from the
> Tube project) blog but I haven't tested it yet meself.

I've got to say that the continued lack of any official way to
manipulate and read images from python is a show stopper for me and a
large number of users of my Primstar scripts for Second Life sculpties.

One of my users offers paid support for my scripts and I know they get
hundreds of new customers each month. The active user base is well into
the thousands, and we are all still using Blender 2.49 :)

I've users on Windows version from XP upwards, various Linux distros and
even Mac users willing to put up with UI bugs caused by my use of
tkinter dialogues.

I'm not interested in rewriting Primstar in C, some of the features
would be too complex to implement as I make extensive use of variable
length lists per pixel during the bake process to provide unrivalled
flexibility in sculptie creation. I also couldn't support all the
platforms I currently do with Python.

Hopefully the mission to move all users to 2.5.x will outweigh the
issues in allowing image editing in Python soon as there's a lot of us
waiting for the scales to tip ;)

Something like the RenderLayer.rect access would be great, but I'd
settle for get_rect and set_rect if live access is too slow on a pixel
basis. Though "too slow" is better than "not possible" in my book
anyway..