[tuhopuu-devel] Aqsis export for Blender

[Chris Want]

> Thanks for pointing out that information.  There was some uncertainty 
> about how we were going to synchronize the sources; it's a relief to see 
> there is this fairly automated method.

Well, it's still a lot of work ... there are usually about 300
conflicts I have to resolve each time, but thankfully many of
them are trivial. Luckily you guys are only working on one
aspect of the program so the conflicts should be somewhat
isolated. To reduce conflicts try to merge as often as possible.
I do it monthly, but I should probably be doing it weekly.

>> * There is no source/blender/aqsis/intern dir
>>  
>>
> 
> If this is the accepted layout then we'll move over to it.

I think it would be best to be as consistent with the
yafray stuff as possible: that way if other renderers are
added in the future they can have a common interface. Who
knows ... maybe down the road common parts of the exporters
can be merged together to reduce duplication?

> I also have a question about where the best location might be to store 
> shaders?  These will need to be placed in a location where they can be 
> distributed in a final build.  One option is to distribute these shaders 
> with Aqsis.  However, they are not much immediate use without Blender, 
> and in the longer term they may also be useful to any RenderMan renderer 
> used with Blender.  For these reasons, it's possibly better that they 
> become part of Blender itself.  What do you think?

I would look at how the plugin sources and stock python scripts
are distributed. Maybe keep the shader sources in
source/blender/aqsis/shaders and either compile or copy
the source files (whichever is most appropriate) to where the
release tarball is created. See the Makefile in the release
directory to see how the other extras are handled.

>> -- I think the only conditions on our side is that the
>> code does not leave tuhopuu uncompilable on some platforms
>> (and on platforms where it doesn't compile there should be a
>> flag to turn off the aqsis feature).
>>  
>>
> 
> I have added such a flag to the scons build system already.  In the 
> configuration file, this flag is:
>    USE_AQSIS = 'false'
> It should essentially revert to a fully-functional, non-Aqsis 
> configuration.

Great ... I can probably help out with the Makefile's build
when I get a bit of free time.

Just out of curiosity, how many people will be working on
this blender/aqsis integration?

Chris