[Bf-viewport] Blender 2.8 Viewport Development

[Mike Erwin]

Brecht's understanding is spot on. Much of my response here is from the doc
notes, with a few tweaked or expanded phrases.

On Fri, Sep 30, 2016 at 5:45 PM, Brecht Van Lommel <
brechtvanlommel at pandora.be> wrote:

> The viewport would draw things like widgets or selection outlines on top
> of that. It would also give control over filtering out certain types of
> objects or shading objects in some way that's different than the final
> render. ...  e.g. a matcap for sculpting while using a different material
> in the final render, or to temporarily hide all hair in the viewport but
> not disable it in the final render.
>

Exactly, the viewport often looks very different from the final render
because you're working on things, not just looking at them. For some tasks
the viewport *will* closely match the render. For real-time game assets
there may not even be a "render" to aim toward!

If I understand it correctly I agree about the UI data and scene data
> distinction, and so a distinction between layers and plates.
> ... It's tempting to unify things here but mixing UI and scene data is
> problematic.
>

"render pass" and "plate" and "layer" all have to do with what to draw &
how to draw it in a view, but are really different things. We shouldn't try
to find one word that describes multiple concepts. That's false unity and
just makes these things harder to discuss and design.


> We want the viewport to be extensible, and modern realtime rendering often
> works in multiple passes, and I guess that's where the concept of plates
> comes into it. In my opinion the details of how this works should be hidden
> from the user. From the user point of view plates could add extra viewport
> options, and tasks may contain presets of such viewport options. But what
> exactly a plate is should not be known to the user, it should be whatever
> is needed to make the API work best for developers.
>

User has direct control over layers. They're the main UI used for
organizing objects in the scene.

Plate is a way of rendering data into the viewport. Most of this data is
from objects in one or more layers. Some is from the world. Plates
automatically come & go based on current task. Some plates expose tweakable
options in a UI panel or in the 3D View itself.

Buffers & (real-time) render passes are implementation details, no UI there.

When using Blender people will be thinking in terms of layers & display
options, same as now, but the display options will be smarter & task
specific.

A familiar example that I hope clarifies: Toggling between object mode &
edit mode, your layers won't change but the plates--and therefore the
visuals and possible interactions--will.

-- Mike
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