[Bf-committers] Blender developers irc meeting,

[Brecht Van Lommel]

Hi,

On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 7:12 PM, michael williamson
<michaelw at cowtoolsmedia.co.uk> wrote:
> /Do we need a full shaded GLSL draw mode for offline renders, given that
> we already have a Rendered draw mode, or do leave this as a game engine
> feature? /
>
> I really must say ABSOLUTELY!  Texture painting has come a long way,
> this SOC promises much more and to lose GLSL would be a huge blow just
> when Blender is becoming a real contender in this area.
>
> Bump map preview in GLSL is a killer feature and a big bonus for texture
> painting right now.... that alone is worth the hurt.
>
> Painting specularintensity maps/glossiness maps  is also very nice using
> GLSL  (and useful for more physically correct shading models where
> glossiness == roughness and a specular intensity == fac on a mic
> closure... Not to mention simpler stiuff like painting an alpha map.
>
> I think that users can accept GLSL not being a /perfect/ representation
> of the final result, but  close enough.

Let me clarify what I mean here a bit, I agree we should keep a GLSL
shading with support for bump maps, glossy maps, etc. But I'm thinking
it may be better to use solid draw mode lighting & simpler BSDF's.
Things like shadows, environment light / AO, indirect light are slow
and very difficult to match.

Assuming you use those in your scene, GLSL is not going to match the
scene lighting well anyway and it's likely to be slow for editing. So
I think it's reasonable to not try to match the scene lighting and
make some approximations to make it more editing oriented rather than
trying to do accurate lighting, instead of trying to match the
renderer as close as possible.

Brecht.