[tuhopuu-devel] Aqsis export for Blender

[Jonathan Merritt]

Hello Everyone,

Since the recent "underground" activities by the Aqsis developers have 
been discovered and posted to the Tuhopuu mailing list, I thought I 
might take the opportunity to make a brief announcement.  The opinions 
here are my own, but they reflect recent discussions I have had with 
Paul Gregory (the creator and maintainer of Aqsis).

As many people are aware, Paul Gregory has started work on an 
Aqsis-specific RenderMan compliant exporter for Blender.  This was 
discussed on the Blender forums here:
    
http://www.blender.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=phpBB2&file=viewtopic&t=3102

Paul has made some heroic advances on his own, but to speed up the 
progress of development, he decided briefly to set up a parallel copy of 
Tuhopuu in the Aqsis CVS repository at SourceForge.  It is important to 
point out that this is *not* a fork!!!  We fully intend to submit 
patches to enable Aqsis export at some date in the future (hopefully the 
near future!).

The reasons for choosing parallel development are briefly as follows:

1. To produce a RenderMan exporter delivered to the Blender community in 
fully working order (rather than bits-and-bobs).

2. To allow all Aqsis developers to commit changes to the project, 
rather than having to rely on (perhaps) one or two coders with commit 
access to the "real" Tuhopuu.

3. To prevent interference with other development that is occuring in 
Tuhopuu, and ensure the officially submitted patches are of high quality.

More information is available on the Aqsis website 
(aqsis.sourceforge.net) in the Wiki and the Forums.  We welcome the 
participation of any and all developers.  However, it's important to 
remember that this work is still very incomplete.  One of the reasons 
for choosing parallel development was to allow the final product to be 
of the high standard expected by Blender users.  We would like to avoid 
the "this doesn't work, so I'll never try it again" phenomenon.

Jonathan Merritt.