The first approach is to wrap everything that RenderaMan (and its myriad of renderers) can do around a complex interface. This is of course simpler to use because its visual, but quickly becomes frustrating because (of course) the one thing you need it to do theres no button for! This approach also has a tendency to produce very complicated interfaces that have to be "hardcoded" with every renderer variation or new feature. The opposite approach is to assemble RenderMan scenes by hand, using several programs and hand written RIB to pull everything together (such as using "wings" to export a model in RIB and "cutter" to assemble the scene). This of course is too complicated for most to do and is also very time consuming, plus its very difficult to visualize during creation. In MOSAIC I'm using a different philosophy, one that says RenderMan as a set of languages is a good thing, and is capable of far more than any interface could provide, but that the user interface should be simple and automate those things that must be automated. To achieve this philosophy MOSAIC facilitates inserting custom, library or generated code (aka code fragments) to almost any part of Blender. This assembling of code fragments is the core concept of MOSAIC (not to mention the meaning behind its name!) and although it demands at least a basic knowledge of RenderMan, it allows for rapid scene design in a open ended and unrestricted way. On the surface it would seem needing to know so much about RenderMan is a bad thing, but in reality you need a good understanding of RenderMan to use any RenderMan exporter on any system! The use of shaders and code fragments opens up an opportunity to view the production pipeline in Blender from a bigger perspective. Technicians can write and test shaders and code fragments and artists can use those fragments to produce models and scenes. My hope is people will begin to contribute custom shaders and code fragments to a community library. The more pre-built content and example files there are, the easier it will be to get up and running on almost any project. At least until a fully integrated solution arrives! I realize that a plugin script will never be what the community really needs, but hopefully it will help get us by.
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