Talking about development time

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
#1

Hi all

this is what the coder of EQUINOX-3D told me:

The GI system has many parts, so I here’s an approximate break-down:

  • Interactive ray-tracer : 2-4 years
  • Path-tracer (with arbitrary BRDFs, physically accurate metals, importance sampling, caustics, motion blur, depth-of field etc.) : about 3 years
  • Photon mapping renderer (caustics, spectral rendering with dispersion, volumetric effects, multiple scattering, sub-surface scattering etc.) : about 5 years
  • Light-map rendering support for all the above : about 3 months
  • Spherical harmonics support (including pre-processing for per-vertex and texture-based SH) : about 6 months

All these are happening in parallel and I have a full-time job, so I can’t dedicate all my time to EQUINOX-3D. Otherwise it may have been faster.
Also, the whole system is still under constant development. I add new features as the field evolves and new techniques are invented.

I think this might shed some light on approximate time estimates for Blender Internal.

#2

we need new features

#3

Thanks for the heads-up Claas; just got a quick glide on Equinox website and must say that the software (and the renders) look very interesting, but… is it still developed?
Last release was on December 2008.

#4

I am not sure

But I thought for many who discuss blenders future and developing a better or a real render front end
this might be good to concider.

It clearly shows that as Alvaro form Yafaray says coding will take years.

#5

Maybe it’s not as depressive as it seems. Depends on how many hours the guy from Equinox3D was thinking to spend per week. As he mentions, he has a full-time job.

If he was thinking for instance to work 10 hours per week, with two full-time coders you have 80 hours of work per week, so each year of those would be 1 month and a half.

Also he seems to be talking about starting from scratch.

#6

Did he already have the knowledge about those features at the time he started writing them? If not, it’s not a fair comparison (plus, it’s not his day job).

This isn’t a realistic scenario if the BF would hire a skilled programmer.
(not saying the equinox guy isn’t skilled, I really mean knowledge about the features…)

edit: ack, basically what Eclectiel already said (I’m slow…).

And @endi: congrats, you’ve got yourself a nice place on top of my ignore list.

#7

this is a non day job result.

of course would be a hired person faster.

but not without a reason was the rebuild of BI estimated in years with the power of one person.