RenderChan development news

Some quick news about RenderChan development. Last few weeks we’ve got several notable contributions from GitHub user, identified himself as Scribblemaniac. Those are the first external contributions to the RenderChan project and I am especially excited about that.

So, here’s what we’ve got from Scribblemaniac:

• RenderChan now ported to Python 3 (!).
• Inkscape module for rendering SVG files.
• Gimp module for rendering XCF, PSD, EPS, WMF, PDF and many other formats.

Those improvements also triggered some additions from my side:

• Two new options to control output dimensions – “use_own_dimensions” and “proxy_scale”. See explanation.
• Desktop integration for Gnome (Nautilus) and KDE (Dolphin).
• Basic project template now shipped with RenderChan sources.

Right now Scribblemaniac is working on RenderChan integration module for Blender. You can see his progress in this repository.

A few words about the further plans of RenderChan development.

I think RenderChan is almost ready for stable release as it currently is. I have just one blocking issue pending in my queue right now. After that I will need to do some testing to ensure 100% compatibility of RenderChan with old Remake projects. Then we can release stable version 1.0.

After that I am going to think about documentation and packaging. For documentation it would be really nice at least to port old Remake tutorial. Any help here is appreciated (especially with screenshots).

With packaging it’s not that simple. The main problem of RenderChan is that it is useless without all its dependencies (blender, synfig, ffmpeg, sox, etc). On Linux this is not much problem, but still some hassles might appear to provide a packages for most distros. On OSX this might be problematic. On Windows it’s a nightmare. I to figure out some way to allow users to easily setup RenderChan with all requirements. Currently I am looking at 0-install as a solution.

That’s all news for now. Stay tuned!