[Bf-committers] Blender's Material system enhancments

[Islam Wazery]

Hi,

My name is Islam Wazery and i want to participate in GSoC this year for
Blender,
i have an idea for the material system and i want to discuss it with you
guys. I don't know if it can be a GSoC project or no.

*Blender's Material system* has a set of nodes that varies from being
Material, Texture and Composition nodes.
There is no way to define new node types.
New nodes will give the shader programmers the ability to write their own
GLSL shaders and extend
the current set of nodes, not only that they can package and save a library
of their new nodes.

My idea is to provide an easy interface for creating new node types which
consists of:
- A wizard for specifying node parameters like
   - The name of the node
   - The type of the node (one node or group of nodes)
   - Inputs to it
   - Outputs form it
   - The Source GLSL code of it which it will performs and replaces in the
shader code list

- A preview for the output effect

- Shader code list window for each node

And also i am thinking of writing a lot more nodes to be provided with
blender's material system as built-in nodes

And to make the idea clear here is a video that have a similar interface
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOoV7j6BhfQ