[Bf-cycles] Status Open Shading Language

[Brecht Van Lommel]

Hi Thomas,

Thanks for bringing things up to date somewhat, I haven't really
looked at in the past few months. I wouldn't expect major changes are
needed, but it's probably not compiling at the moment and some code
tweaks will be needed.

On Sun, Jun 3, 2012 at 6:42 PM, Thomas Dinges <blender at dingto.org> wrote:
> 4) Proposal
> I realize this is not an immediate and urgent task but I want to propose
> the following integration process for OSL in Cycles:
>
> a) Build a stable library of OSL (OSL 1.1 at this time) for Linux (then
> Windows, Mac) which works with our other libraries.
> b) Fix possible issues and get Cycles to compile with the OSL libs.
> c) Port over remaining nodes/shaders to OSL and check existing OSL code.
> d) Write support for custom OSL shaders, by adding a OSL node or
> something similar.
>
> It would be good to at least have "a" and "b" done, and keep it working
> on "b" level. Any other work then can be done step by step and when
> resources are available.
>
> I would like to hear your opinion (especially yours Brecht) on that,
> could that work?
> I guess I can do some more work and fixes, but until now I was not able
> to build the OSL libraries myself, so it's a bit guessing if the code
> works or not.

If others like to contribute to the OSL backend and get it compiling
working, that's fine with me. I only have limited time at the moment,
can give some pointers and advice, but further it's probably up to
others at the moment.

I'd say OSL itself is pretty much working as well as we would need it
to work. There might be some minor bumps that we run into when we
decide to use it for an actual release but overall I just don't really
have any requests to improve OSL itself. I've contributed patches to
get things building on Windows, and that's probably the main area
where more tweaks are needed in OSL itself, it's not quite working out
of the box there. It's similar with OIIO, things are quite well
production tested, just not really maintained for
Windows/BSD/Solaris/..

Brecht.