Custom Blender Viewport Rendering

[zicklag]

In order to make it easier to preview my game and reduce development iteration time

As a game developer

I want to be able to have a live render preview for what my game's lights and materials will look like in the Blender viewport. Similar to how you can select the Eevee renderer and view it live in the viewport, except it will use our game's renderer and/or shaders.

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This needs some investigation. Something to look at: Blender GPU Shader Modules.

[fu5ha]

A possibility here might be to create a shared texture between the game and Blender, so the came could draw into it and then blender could draw that onto a textured quad or something using the GPU capabilities you linked, and then render the manipulation widgets and whatever else over top.

[zicklag]

Yeah, that would be cool. It sounds like it could be just feasible enough and definitely worth investigation.

[Raj2032]

I would love to see that take place. Other game engines have it and it will be 100% a great idea to also have this feature.

[Raj2032]

@termhn

A possibility here might be to create a shared texture between the game and Blender, so the came could draw into it and then blender could draw that onto a textured quad or something using the GPU capabilities you linked, and then render the manipulation widgets and whatever else over top.

Sorry I didn't quite understand that, so if in object mode you want the models to use some special texture on it right?

[fu5ha]

No. Basically the Arsenal engine would render the scene into an off-screen framebuffer that is shared with blender. Then Blender would draw this framebuffer onto its own viewport by just drawing a single rectangle across the whole screen. Finally, Blender would then draw the little manipulator tool thingies on top of that

[Raj2032]

@termhn I see mate that sounds great :)

[zicklag]

Issue moved to Taiga: https://tree.taiga.io/project/zicklag-arsenal/us/90