Why so long years and internal renderer do not have Caustics, what is that limiting factor in BI? like Yafaray…
try cycles, that does, i think it will replace the ir in time.
When you actually hear about the state of the code structure within BI (lots of shading hacks, workarounds, and bandaids), it’s easy to note that there’s no real way to bring a proper caustic implementation without re-writing large parts of the shading code.
That is why the Cycles engine is being developed, Brecht and the Blender foundation figured that it would be a better option to just replace BI with an entirely new, modern, engine with a clean and modern codebase then digging through and rewriting the shading system for BI itself. And I wouldn’t doubt their judgement as they figured this as the best option after Brecht started refactoring the existing shading code as part of the Sintel Project. (the render25 branch)
Is it official that BI will be abandoned or is that wishful thinking? I stopped following the cycles thread a while ago for various reasons.
afaik blender internal is officially going to be replaced, as long as cycles will be mature enough to match internal’s features (and better looking of course)
BI will be maintained until there is no need for it anymore. It will most probably not be updated however, since that effort is best spent on improving Cycles.