the better question is: what can muse do? its not ready yet. muse didnt render a single frame yet and you ask us what futures we would like to see in a renderman renderer?
my answer: give us all its got.
the other question is how can it be integrated?
full integration, meaning compiling/converting blender-shaders on the fly into, in this case muse shaders.
that would work more or less ,like the new pixar PRman4maya, which does just that, using directly maya-scene descriptions and convert its shaders .
but that is also quite limited and does not free the real power of an renderman renderer.
for most, this would be nice to see. id like to see another external render option, I really would.
so you going to finish the code for muse, while you simultaniously work on a blender export? wow!! thumps up!!
but then again you come to the blender development forum
writing things like:
pixelbox wrote:Ok, It´s all fine bertram
. I am just a little bit tired of what some people are writing about Muse. Things like: " There is no point in another GPL RenderMan compliant "; " Why another Open Source Renderer "; " It will never be released "... and that sort of things. They even complain because they havent seen a single line of code
. For all the people that write this about Muse and call my Academy of things like " stupid idea ", I just have one thing to say: I intend to deal and work with professionals. So kids, play with your toys.
Blender users are very important to the development of Muse, since I whant to provide a close integration of Blender with Muse.
now my question is:
is there a point in another open source renderer? I think the question is quite o.k. in my p.o.v. , but anyway, if your philosophy is a little different to others, thats just fine with me.
I know that the aqsis team worked on a seamless renderman compliant integration into blender, doing the above mentioned: converting blender-shaders into aqsis shaders. its an ongoing project which is integrated in the tuhopoo-tree, but has to be rewritten from scratch, as some changes made this effort obsolete.
so we have one guy over there and another over here, doing or aiming to do exactly the same
but thats just my point of view. if in the end of the day your project comes along fine, thats all right with me. if muse will provide support for blender (or vice versa) and you write the necessary code for that : thumps up.
as for today we havent seen muse in action and I doubt that writing a renderman renderer from scratch is an easy task, but hey, go right ahead.
I would like to see a powerfull open source renderman -compliant render-engine, just as I would like to see a powerfull blender 3d -suite.
so: my question again: what can muse do and when will the first pre-alpha for testing be downloadable? in 6 month? well, this discussion can be unfolded then.
hope that this does not sound to harsh. the ideal would be if we could make blender write renderman shaders within blender, integrating a complete new window/function as it is possible within houdini for example. this new function should work just as shrimp or the tool (aka shaderman) and these shaders can than be assigned to the objects, plus the possibility to assign a custom shader from file. that would deffinately be nice.
unfortunately ppl like goran, green and jan have abandoned the idea of further developing a .rib exporter.
the ideal would be if these guys, paul + others from aqsis and yourself would stick your heads together and work something out. together. something like a kick a** exporter completely integrated as a native blender function, where you can select your prefered render engine and have your shaders for your renderer compiled on the fly, assign them and hit the renderbutton.
I can assure you that will not happen. The reason why I want to provide a good relation between Muse and Blender is because I believe in the strong potential of Blender. And, I also believe in the strong features of Muse, like support for OpenEXR. And, with the ray-tracing features, more surprises are just aroun the corner.