[Bf-funboard] Freestyle into Blender: Howto?

[Matt Ebb]

On 3/9/07, Michael Crawford <psyborgue at mac.com> wrote:
>
> Just to be clear, in case i wasn't earlier (I was in a hurry):
> Multiple renderers already work with linked scenes.
>

I'm aware of this, we used it extensively in ED and I'm using it right now
at work. And although it can be flexible and useful as a way of making
complicated things possible, I certainly wouldn't call it convenient.

It's a lot of hassle to divide things up into multiple scenes, set up the
render layers, set up data links between objects (i.e. do you want objects
linked? or their data? but different materials?), and even after you've gone
through this whole process, when you're working with multiple scenes it's
extremely easy to get lost and confused, trying to keep track of what
objects are linked to where and what ipos are controlling them. It's also
messy when you're switching back and forward between different Screens, with
different Scenes per Screen. And another problem with multiple scenes is
that object relationships (parenting, constraints) go crazy between objects
on different scenes, since the Dependency graph is per-scene. This was a
problem in ED in the 'giant hands' shots, since each hand had to be rendered
on a separate scene to save memory.

Anyway, having such a feature to split a freestyle render across scenes
would of course be useful and good to have, but I don't think it's a good
idea for it to be the primary method of using such a feature. It's out of
the reach of many newer users and it's inconvenient even if you do know what
you're doing.

Personally, I'd like to see a plethora of renderers supported by blender, so
> I could use the best renderer per element/pass.  Perhaps a Universal
> Rendering Interface / API of some sort could be proposed, designed,
> and implemented so third parties can easily integrate into blender without
> python (a language that is constantly changing) scripts.
>

Absolutely, that would be great as a general thing but it's also a wider
scope if you're talking about 'integrating freestyle with Blender' as
opposed to providing a connection to external renderers. If the freestyle
people would like it to be integrated with Blender, then I'd like to see it
integrated as tightly and as easy to use as possible.

cheers,

Matt
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