[Bf-python] Materials and Shaders

[Anders Nilsson]

The Material-module of the blender python-API seems underdeveloped, just
the basic stuff is there and there are several limitations due to the
nature of the blender implementation (such as when the material is in
halo mode values returned are "wrong". I don't have any proposals for
changes (apart from the fact that more stuff should be available just as
Joseph added more information from the scene module via the render
context).

Is anyone working on this? Exposing all data through 9000 functions
would be nice, doing something more clean would be even nicer though...
:) I guess there is some historical reason for this, such as that the
materials inside Blender changes rapidly as new renderer are
incorporated (such as raytracing, yafray etc).

And nice solution would be that the material, besides having what it
does now, had a 'type' that said what kind of shading it had (halo,
blinn, etc) and then you could make getData() as on the object to get
the parameters valid for that shading module. Say that the toon-renderer
respects the diffuse color then it would only hold the diffuse color and
nothing else in a Material.Tooon.

Just my 3skr (no we didn't join EMU)

Anders Nilsson (breakin)