Good idea!
So the targets for the lighting effort could be:
- Point Lights (PL)
- Area Lights (AL)
- Image-Based Lighting (IBL)
- Hosek-Wilkie Skylight (HWS)
- A tri-point lighting functionality, based on PL and AL (priority 2)
- Plus a Camera Object (CAM), to meet a need expressed here: https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=40839
I should post soon first PRs for Point Lights and go through other points, but any help is welcome! @nocturnial: yes, your help would be especially precious with HWS (what I just know about the sun is that it should be somewhere above my head during the day...), let me know how you see things.
A point about design: my idea would be to develop all lighting stuff above (PL, AL, IBL, HWS, and even CAM) as objects we could insert freely into rendering projects (and which renderers modules should then convert to renderer-specific formats), with the following characteristics:
- objects would not be render-dependent: e.g. we could have the same HWS or the same CAM used for a Luxcore project and a Blender project
- in a given project, we could have several instances of the same class. It is obvious for PL and AL, but I think we should also consider the possibility, in the same project, to have several HWS, several CAMs etc. that the user could activate/deactivate for a given rendering.
--> Any comments appreciated!