Hi Arjo,
I really should have a look at Vray, there even is a Sketchup plugin!
(never had a look at that, having RS3d)
So many powerful RS features are tightly interwoven with the rendering
engine... just some more examples from my bare head:
- VSL enhanced nurbs curve rendering (everybody knows Tim Borgmann's
renderings!)
- VSL-defined Displacement
- blurred reflections and refractions
- material antialiasing
- UV sets
All these things and much more would be lost or would have to be set up
from scratch in the external render engine. RS is a strange powerful
beast on an isolated island, despite its basically very open
architecture...
You are right about VSL´s lack of visual feedback, it doesn´t deserve
the name `VISUAL shading language` - about time to switch to a node
based interface! We are lucky RS is so flexible it´s possible to set up
a better material preview but doing small test renders is the only way
to judge what you´re doing.
good luck,
Mark
Thank you Mark.
What you write about VSL is what I ment in my first reaction on Jason's
question about a Fryrender plugin.
On the other hand VSL is not the only way to create procedural materials.
With Vray I can build procedural very easily. So procedurals won't be the
problem. What I wanted to say about VSL in general is that it lacks visual
feedback. It's all lines of code which doesn't give any visual idea about
what you're doing. Maybe that's how programmers work, but that's not what
I'm used to.
Booleans is a real problem in polygon based apps. Well only in round
objects of course.
Arjo.
