[Edu-sig] The Fate of VPyton >> BLENDER ??

[ajsiegel at optonline.net]

> On Friday 13 October 2006 4:04 am, Jason Cunliffe wrote:
> > My subversive proposal to you is along those lines.
> > Optimistically, I imagined that maybe a VPython version of 
> Blender is
> > quite possible AND a good idea.

Guess I am not seeing it.  Vpython needs compatibility with numpy, and a few
committed maintainers building distributions - Windows, deb, Mac X11 - and it
is a viable project.  A crossplatform windowing solution - like glut - would
bring Mac native into the fold, and make ongoing development/maintenance
easier.  Eliminating the boost dependency would have advantages, if not too much is sacrificed.  Either way,  move on with the 4.xxx branch that Jonathan had begun bringing
transparency, spot-lighting - etc. into the fold.

Again, I simply don't see it as that far off. The fact that the community
surrounding it is rather thin technically is its biggest vulnerability.  I can contribute
to trying to solve that by upgrading my own lower-level skills, and by trying to recruit
some interest by others who have those skills already. 

That's *my* plan.

The potential connection with blender I see is through the yafray rendering engine

www.yafray.org

wihich is connected to the blender project, but not exactly sure how.

Yafray is a high quality rendering engine with an XML scene description 
language.

It would be interesting if vpython could import and export from
Blender via this XML.

I had explored trying to implement this via PyGeo, but yafray XML is notoriously
underdocumented at this point.  If that improves, I would definititely try to
do something.  PyGeo already exports nicely to Pov-Ray, so the infrastructure to
do this kind of thing is already there. Would be relatively trivial to add the 
yafray XML alternative.  To me, among other things, it's just an excuse to get
hands on with XML functionality - but maybe it would lead to something
interesting.

> > MIT live drawing*
> > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZNTgglPbUA

Don't have the bandwidth available to me to give it a look from
here. Hoepfully when I get back.


Art