[Bf-committers] Raytraced GI in Blender Internal?

[Konfuse Kitty]

Hello all,

I've come here from the BlenderArtists forums with a couple of questions for Ton and other developers, regarding raytraced GI in Blender Internal.

Forum member Blenderer started a thread on the subject, generating a lot of interest:

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?227982-I-miss-raytrace-rendering-with-indirect-lighting-(

The basic premise of the discussion is that raytraced GI was available in early beta versions of 2.5, and some still use the betas specifically for this feature. At one bounce setting it works well enough, is comparatively very fast, and generally superior to the Approximate Indirect Lighting in the stable 2.5x releases.

Another forum member, Ace Dragon, detailed quite a few reasons why the raytrace option may have been abandoned. However, the consensus is that most of the problems disappear when only one bounce is used. The fact that raytraced GI was used in Sintel has also been noted; many of us expected the same functionality in stable releases.

Basically, we would really like to have raytraced GI back in Blender Internal. So we have two "burning questions" we would like to ask of Ton and other decision makers:

1. Will Blender Internal be kept as an option alongside Cycles? Many of us appreciate the optimised, biased nature of BI and would like it to remain.
2. If BI will be kept, what would it take to bring back raytraced GI, even if only at one bounce setting? If it's a matter of resources, money, we could try having a fundraising drive.

I hope you can give this your considered response, and I will then copy the main points to the forum. Or feel free to post to the forum thread directly.

Thank you for all your excellent work in Blender! :-)

KonfuseKitty