[Bf-viewport] Viewport and shader system patches

[Roberto Maurizzi]

On Tue, Dec 29, 2015 at 7:39 PM, Alexander Romanov <a.romanov at blend4web.com>
wrote:

>
> I agree that BI material system is outdated, but at the moment we
> (Blend4Web Team) are quite satisfied with BI state except some not so deep
> imperfections. So we are going to correct that imperfections. For example
> here is some refactoring proposal
> <http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Blender_Internal_Nodes_Refactoring>
> http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Blender_Internal_Nodes_Refactoring
>

I'd really like to be able to experiment with your new BI nodes to see how
much they allow to do for NPR.

I agree that it's hardly worth to port all nodes of cycles, but some of
> them can be very useful because there are no alternative.
> For example Vector Transform node is a general node for vector conversion.
> I think it should appear in BI anyway. And another useful node is Normal
> Map.
>

Porting or writing additional nodes would be a good stopgap measure to give
new features while a new system is implemented (yeah, I know, I'm stating
the obvious :D )

BI and Viewport already have a lot of self-sufficient functionality. Could
> refactoring of the current shader system be an alternative to writing the
> whole system from scratch? I mean, we could incrementally prepare the
> current architecture for further PBR implementation. At the beginning, It
> could be just a PBR mode for node and simple materials which will replace
> non-physical inputs(diffuse , specular etc) with physical ones(metalness,
> roughness etc).
>

I fear the current system isn't flexible enough to allow decent use of
typical patterns used in video games engines and NPR. We usually use as a
comparison what was done in the game "Guilty Gear Xrd", because it's very
good, it runs realtime on a PS3 and there are very good information
available, but with the current node structure some things are not
possible, others require a bunch of nodes to do a few simple math
operations, ending up with horribly huge node trees instead of 50 lines of
GLSL...


> But in any case removing deprecated OpenGL API is a good beginning.
>

 Very true :-)


Roberto
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