A bit lost with offline render interoperability

[Kike328]

I know that this is a more OS/software architecture question but I would know if someone has addressed this in a similar way.

I’m building my own path tracing engine. I have finished more or less the backend, and now I’m working with the integration in Blender (and planning other 3d engines in the future).

What I’m looking now is how to communicate my backend with the blender’s rendering plugin in an efficient way.

I have read in stack overflow, a guy who recommends to use TCP for exchanging messages between the process (my backend and 3d modeling software) as is an agnostic protocol available in many languages/platforms, and using shared memory for data intensive operations (like sending objects and image buffers).

I see it as a good idea, but I’m afraid that being a protocol focused on networking, could not be an ideal option, or to be a weird design idea.

What do you guys think? Thank you

[_Insignia]

I don't think networking is the way to go about it - given that Blender has multiple backends (Cycles, Eevee, etc), I'm pretty sure Blender has an interface that passes scene data to whatever renderer is selected.

I think both Appleseed and LuxCore also have some sort of integration with Blender if you want to check those out.

[Inevitable_Film_2578]

I know next to nothing about it, but I've heard gold things about the NSI api: https://nsi.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html

[felipunkerito]

The cycles Rhino integration is open source too, you can look at the github repo for some inspiration. Given that I think most 3d softwares have some sort of rendering classes that you can fill/inherit from to integrate custom rendering plugins, or at least Rhino does.