As in, a portion/section of Blender like UVmapping, the sequencer ect… was left way behind feature wise and maybe even left for dead, but a developer comes along and revives it to an even stronger level.
One of the most famous examples is the BGE portion, it was literally left for dead and for a while it seemed like it was just waiting to be removed from Blender for good, it had memory leaks, bugs, and large scale projects were impossible with those problems. Then came Ben2610.
Because of him the BGE is again for the first time in years in great shape and faster then before, it’s been revived and fixed, and it may now have a bright future.
So what portions of Blender has been left behind but revived, was full of bugs and was way behind in usability and power and then revived by a new developer?
Anyway, I agree, NURBS need fixed. When I was an idiotic modeler using Maya, its all I would model in (then I would wonder why I couldnt make sharp edges), What did I learn? RTFM!
yah NURBS and SDS together a strong combo. I very often miss NURBS functions like
trim etc when working with SDS. Both together like in AMAPI pro that is terrific.
It might be a good idea to do a complete overhaul of the rendering engine, seeing at there are so many things that need doing. It may be a good idea to configure Blender’s own renderer for anims only and fully integrate something like Yafaray or Lux Render as a ‘full blown’ rendering solution.
That would be a shame in a way as it is very possible to get great results out of the Blender renderer, you just have to work at it a lot harder and know all the tricks.
Yes, the #1 on my personal wish-list would be to have a Render API - with the Blender internal renderer reimplemented to use that API.
From what I have read there seems to have been some developer disagreement on whether the render API should A) expose data or B) export data. It seems pretty clear to me that A is the right choice. And if someone really wants, a B option could be built on top of A.
It really ought to happen soon I think. Its pretty obvious that the internal renderer has gotten a little behind the times, and I can imagine that it now is kludges built on top of kludges.
I guess the event restructuring is the current big thing for 2.5, but I would hope that a/the render API becomes the next big project for the senior developers.
I think Brecht and Broken revitalized the render portion to an extent, all their additions make it possible to get much nicer results in BI. It’ll be even better when Broken gets his IBL patch in and Brecht implements the one bounce lighting for colorbleed that he said was possible in the Peach blog.
Yes, the one bounce lighting (or “final gathering” as it is called in Mental Ray) should really just be a simple extension of the ray-traced ambient occlusion. The difference is that in addition to the distance, the brightness of the intersected surface needs to be calculated.
But I’m still hoping for a clean sheet render API… that way we would be able to see all kinds of cool rendering implementations. Imagine just being able to select a Reyes type renderer. Or an unbiased GI renderer. It would also offload the rendering development work from the core Blender developers.
I was thinking that suggesting that re-writing the renderer would be a truly Herculean task. I’ve seen projects like the Lux Render, Indigo and all the little Renderman clones that seem to get a pretty good start with only a few coders. So maybe it might not be such a silly thing to ask.
Is there any chance of Q-Dune living again - even if its only for micro poly displacement?
