Hi!
I'm still writing on that Gelato
render plugin for XSI, and everything is coming together quite nicely.
I've encountered a few problems, however, so maybe one of you has some
ideas or workarounds, or I might save someone a few headaches with my
workarounds:
Retrieving rendering options:
This seems to be a more general
problem in XSI. Try this:
-) make a new scene
-) on the render tab, under
Render->Scene Options, select "Hardware Renderer" as your scene
renderer
-) draw a render region in a
viewport (it will render with the hardware renderer)
-) right click on the
region->Options
The region options will open, and
the render options tab will be the one for mental ray, even though the
hardware renderer is active. When you change the region renderer from
"Use Scene Render Options" to "Hardware Renderer", the correct tab will
be displayed.
Now when you are working with the
standard renderers, then this is only a cosmetic problem. But when you
are writing a rendering plugin, this is very ugly.
The context you get passed contains
a GetRendererProperty function which should return the currently active
rendering options. If there are no local options, however (like in the
example above), this will return a NULL reference. So, I wrote a
function that basically does this:
- grab options from context
- are they even there? when yes,
finished
- when no, grab options from current
pass
- are they even there? when yes,
finished
- when no, grab options from scene
passes container
- are they even there? when yes,
finished
- when no, there's something
fundamentally wrong, since the scene passes container should have a
local options container for all installed renderers, so bug out with an
error message
Now, this is not very "nice", but it
works. My question now is: Is this the correct way to handle this? Is
the RendererContext->GetRendererProperty function working correctly?
Getting
Framebuffers/RenderChannels:
I'm trying to make the Gelato
renderer feel just as integrated in XSI as mental ray, so that includes
render channels and multiple framebuffers per render. Luckily, Gelato
supports that natively (and in a very nice and flexible way, I have to
say).
Again, the RendererContext should
give the rendering plugin everything it needs through the
GetFramebuffers function. However, for me this always returns an empty
CRefArray.
So, I'm again running off into the
passes and grabbing my Framebuffers from the currently active pass,
which so far works nicely. However, when I try to get the render
channel for a frame buffer (through the
Framebuffer->GetRenderChannel() function), I always get an empty
object back.
That's not too bad for the normal
file outputs for a pass, I can extract enough information from the
Framebuffer's Format and DataType properties to construct the correct
output, but for the render region it's not so cool. The Framebuffer I
get from the RendererContext->GetDisplayFramebuffer also doesn't
contain a Renderchannel. Therefore, currently, the Channel-> setting
on the render region doesn't do anything, since I can't get the
selection the user made.
Am I doing something wrong here? Is
there some way I can get the render channel the user currently has
selected for the render region? Is there generally any way I can find
out if the render is happening in a region?
General Rendering Plugin
Question:
Well - is anyone even interested in
using a different renderer than mental ray in XSI? If yes, then why?
What are the features you are looking for in other renderers?
Ciao, Daniel!
