New Blender plugin

[Alessandro Tasora]

Dear Chrono users

at 

https://api.projectchrono.org/development/introduction_chrono_blender.html

you can find an introduction to the new Blender plugin that will allow high quality rendering of Chrono simulations.

This is the first release of the plugin, in beta version, so some features might be incomplete or with bugs - please report if so. 

This Blender postprocessing plugin is meant to replace the POVray postprocessing system. 

A first reason is about quality: Blender can use the Cycles rendering engine, which is a modern path tracing algorithm with unbiased physically-based rendering, whereas Povray is based on a older method (ray tracing, biased, not physically-based).

A second reason is that Blender is also a modeler with a 3D interactive GUI, so you can navigate the scene before rendering it in high quality, or you can even add additional assets (landscapes, clouds, other objects) or modify/edit/improve the meshes exported from the Chrono side.

Best regards

Alessandro Tasora