On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 2:05 PM, Matt Lind <[email protected]> wrote:
> No argument on the making existing tools work, but in terms of tool design > you make the erroneous assumption everybody wants to create realistic > looking renders like you. I’ve largely worked on non-photo real projects > where those extra controls you dislike are absolutely necessary and often > not enough. This industry is about making looks and scenarios. It’s not > always about recreating what you see in front of you.**** > > > Actually, I agree completely. FWIW, I don't assume that everybody wants to create realistic looking renders. Sometimes I don't want to either -- it all depends on the needs of the job, and lately it's all been "make it look more real." My point was that it should be possible, but not necessary, to drill down into low-level functionality in order to do commonplace things. And for better or worse, plausibly realistic rendering is a very common requirement. To beat my car analogy to death -- it shouldn't be necessary for someone to know how to tune a fuel injection system in order to get their car to the supermarket. It's a great thing if someone does take the plunge and learn how to be a racecar mechanic or driver, but as you said, most people can't or won't do that. Anyway, even a racing mechanic doesn't want to break out his toolbox when he wants to go to Kwik-E-Mart. The sad fact is we have enormous variation in education and educability in our workforce, and even if we resist building for the lowest common denominator, we need to consider it when assembling our tools. It's easy to take this too far -- then you end up with C4D, which makes some hard things shockingly easy, but won't let you do some basic things at all. And as far as maintaining compatibility with legacy assets goes, I don't advocate trashing the legacy shader libraries and making them unusable. But is there any reason that, say, the default scene material couldn't be a BSDF version of Phong (or Blinn or Ward or Ashikhmin) with fresnel and energy conservation? Is there a reason the default light can't be, say, mib_photometric? Why shouldn't the default material be updated when technology advances? Wouldn't it help move people along by making the default versions of things be the latest ones rather than the oldest? You could always have a "Classic Mode" button for people who just don't want to change. Why not make improved versions of things in addition to retaining legacy versions? It's not like the legacy versions are being actively developed anyway. I'm sure the code in some of the shaders hasn't been touched in 15 years. I'd also be kind of shocked if making these additions required a compatibility-killing change to core application code -- if that were the case, it wouldn't be possible for people to make modern 3rd-party renderers like Arnold or VRay work with Softimage and Maya.
