I’m an indie filmmaker and don’t have financial conditions to buy tons of CPUs for rendering 15000 images (a 10 minutes short), so my eyes are all orientated to other forms of converting ideas to visual representations readable by other persons.
I’ve been asking this here for years, but when I first started to ask for this kind of functionalities there weren’t any other software doing it so was very difficult to explain the idea, so now becomes easier for everyone understand what I was referring back then.
Would it be possible to bring Cinebox functionality to BGE?
I see it as a non-interactive game ;). So you can make a game, remove the interactive UI (keyboards, mouse) and see what happens.
The most games wait for user input. Therefore you need to trigger the game by other events (timers, animation sequences).
A good computer game tries to make the player feel he joins an existing (virtual) world. The world leaves the impression it exist without the player.
If you have such a game, there shouldn’t be that much left to make it run without the player. E.g. you can even simulate the players input (like a recording input).
Games are usually event based rather than time based.
The thing is the BGE is separate from Blender. It “just” uses the data not the workflow.
I think what you need is a “BGE Renderer” then you can use all the tools from Blender. As far as I remember there was such a request quite some time ago. I do not know if that was ever picked up by a developer.
I had a project once, CinemaBlender, unfortunately had to put on hold due to Cos and not knowing any python… anyways, the idea is to have an online or LAN realtime film making system. It would be played like a game , only some "players2 would control the capturing cameras. Also it can be run by one person by animating each player at the time! All FX and effects are limited to the BGE, also frame rate is irrelevant, rendering depends on the recording PC GPU power. Well, I still plan to do more animating and games, if I ever make of my hobby my profession!
But yes, it was possible with 2.58, it’s even more possible now!
Rendering depth would be a tad more difficult. You would either have to re-render each frame with every object using a material that gets darker as the distance increases. You can accomplish this through the node editor or (this would be much simpler on the user side) by using a script that cycles through all the objects and creates a custom shader to display depth.
Another alternative is to use 2d Filters for the DOF and other similar effects. Then you wouldn’t have to render the depth pass.
So in summary: most of the features are possible but not all are easy to implement.
Ex.
It should become interesting.