[Bf-funboard] Crafter SourceCode

Daniel Barbeau bf-funboard@blender.org
Sat, 19 Jul 2003 12:58:54 +0200


> Hi,
>
> Anyone feels like posting a review of this here?
> Curious to find out how people perceive it.
>
> -Ton-

Hi!

Well this isn't exactly a review, just an opinion ;)

I've tested Crafter since it's very beggining. At the time I think it
was on the elYsiun
"Foundation Forum" (now closed).

The positive points are that Crafter uses a very understandable
interface. A little like the
DarkTree editor. It's very visual and even newbies can get a hold on
it quickly enough.
It's become a very used way to build shaders, mosts apps use it and
therefor, Blender's interface
could become more understandable to people who wome from other apps.

About the interface : it's pretty nice, yeah :) But slow on some
machines
that do not have good Ogl acceleration. This could be solved by taking
away some eye-candy.
Another little problem is that if it's integrated as-is in Blender
were gonna have a small discontinuity
is the general interface's design, hehe!

Blender would greatly benefit from Crafter's integration. With some
work (adding support for image maps),
Crafter could efficiently replace the Material AND the Texture panels.
Sure it would make a major
change for experienced users but, then if we gain in
understandability, i think such a change should be done.

I also think Blender could use some general GUI clarifications,
"explicitations" ... the integration of
Crafter would be the first step in that direction. Maybe some "GUI"
commity could be organised to
do some researches on how to improve the actual GUI...

Let's come back to the Crafter.
There is something I'm not sure of : I think I understood that Crafter
tells the renderer
how to combine the textures (procedurals or image map). So, if this is
true, Blender's
own procedurals would need to be extended to be compatible with
Crafter's already
available set of procs. Crafter doesn't contain "blocks" code, does
it?

And this brings me to the problem of exports :)
Crafter already knows how to send data to Yafray, VIrualight etc...
That's great. However and obviously the choice of which renderer would
have to be set globally,
like green and nishin did in tuhopuu.
hehe, I might aswell post in the Yafray export forum :)

Okay, I hope this is understandable, cause I have the feeling I went
in all directions.
May you find the way back, hehe!

Ciao
Dani