Let me give you all my "meta" idea why I am interested in shaders affecting the preview mode as impactfully as possible, as real as possible.

Animation.

Think about it. If your goal is to produce semi-realistic animation (not hyper-real animation, but not "toon" either)........

You can make your final raw frames by rendering not with Firefly, but with Preview. Get some good color, some good skin shading, some semi-realism in preview mode, 'make movie' with anti-alias set on, and your render time for a 720x480 frame is 2-4 seconds.

You then open the folder of frames (your image sequence) in After Effects or Photoshop and apply filters.

I am just beginning to fool around with this idea. Here is my test animation.

http://jrdonohue.com/anna1.mov

There is a velvet shader on the dress and of course skin shaders on the skin. Please forgive "film grain overload" in this animation; it is only a test, and once I proved out the idea I did not attempt any refinement of the Photoshop filter(s).

1. Biggest challenges: getting dynamic hair to render in anything but black.
2. no shadows.

This animation was rendered in preview mode, render time 3 seconds per frame, Photoshop filter applied to all frames under "automation."

NOTE: while you might think  the great benefit is 'hardware assisted render of preview mode under OpenGL", I actually had my preview set to SreeD. Why? Well, it's the hair. First of all, dynamic hair under this plan must be clicked "show populated". Well, under OpenGL the hair does not look as good in preview; it looks much better and fuller under SreeD. More experimentation to come. One interesting avenue: kicking up the hair population from, say, 15,000 to 40,000. It affects render time a little because of the resources necessary to render the preview of each frame; but not much. Overloaded hair like that does not increase hair sim time, since you calculate the sim with "show populated' off, then turn it on before render.

::::: Opera :::::