( Re-posted from the patch tracker, since it'll be down soon ) A while ago, Brecht added the do_preview flag for the render API, to allow external renderers to generate preview renders for the property editors (eg. materials). This was a good start, but it's not really enough - it just exposes blender's internal preview.blend scene to the render API, which often isn't very useful - it's heavily tailored to blender's internal renderer and most other renderers are better served by their own specific preview scenes that take advantage of that renderer's capabilities.
This forces exporters to do all kinds of dodgy voodoo to replace the blender preview scene - checking for a scene name of 'preview' and trying to guess which is the active material being previewed by looking over object names in the preview scene file, which is not very robust. The attached patch provides an optional 'render_preview' function for exporters to implement, which gets called upon doing a preview render (rather than the normal 'render' function). This means that exporters know explicitly when a preview render is being called. Additionally, as well as the scene, it passes in a pointer to the material in question that's being previewed so you don't need to guess it. This makes it much easier to send the material properties to a custom preview scene for that render engine. patch: http://mke3.net/blender/devel/2.5/render_api_preview.txt https://projects.blender.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=25092&group_id=9&atid=127 cheers Matt _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
