Blender 2.8 development thread

[kayosIII]

@aermartin

@D3Pixel

No I have not, but thanks for the link. I wouldn’t spend any time on it until the PBR viewport is there, and we can first create accurate materials in Blender that matches as close as possible UE4.

But somewhere down the line, that link will be useful.

But lets wait and see how it goes, .XML is not an optimal exchange format. But it’s better than nothing, same goes for the current MODO plugin for UE4.

If we where to piggy back on it, we would be depending on how good the foundry is maintaining it.
https://github.com/TheFoundry-Modo/UnrealPlugin/

the source c++ code is available on a github repo. We could even do our own version.

GitHub - kayosiii/UnrealPlugin: Modo 10's Unreal editor plugin (for loading...

There is also my fork of the plugin which I made for my workplace (3dsmax/octane) I have added the ability to arbitralily complex node based materials.

[xrg]

There is a new viewport blog update on code.blender.org for anyone interested.

[Ace_Dragon]

Aleph Objects (a 3D printing company) has become the fourth notable dev. sponsor for the 2.8 project

Industry support for Blender — blender.org

2 devs. on Blender 101 and workflow subject, Blender is slowly obtaining a small army of developers that will only make 2.8 that much better.

[xrg]

That’s good news. It’s always nice to have more sponsored devs. 2.8 is going to rock!

[theApe]

@Ace Dragon

Aleph Objects (a 3D printing company) has become the fourth notable dev. sponsor for the 2.8 project
https://www.blender.org/press/industry-support-for-blender/

2 devs. on Blender 101 and workflow subject, Blender is slowly obtaining a small army of developers that will only make 2.8 that much better.

You´re usually more up to speed on these things, Kansas:

Blender 2.8 development thread

you getting old?

[Ace_Dragon]

Well it just now appeared in Blender.org’s news section (I must’ve read over the part about their sponsorship, I already knew about Tangent, Nimble, and AMD).

[soul (soulfire)]

[lsscpp]

Nice video. Somehow it makes you feel something that often is underrated: how professional Blender is, and how serius this software has become in the 3d arena

[Richard_Marklew]

Blender Developer Meeting Notes for Sunday 26th March 2017
https://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2017-March/048194.html

Hi all,

Here are the notes for today’s meeting in irc.freenode.net #blendercoders.

1. Blender 2.79 release targets

• Meeting agrees to move the BCon3 date a week. (deadline to have all targets in master).
  Several release targets are still not ready, but they are very near.

• Don’t forget the docs! Each new feature can only be committed if you add a release log ready doc.

• Currently the VR display (OpenHMD) branch is getting a critical review. To make a balanced
  decision we’d like to hear from more HMD users what they think.

https://developer.blender.org/D2133#60417

2. Blender 2.8x projects

• The Eevee roadmap, summary is on https://code.blender.org/
  The full doc is here: https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.8/Source/Viewport/Eevee

• Pyshader proposal: https://developer.blender.org/D2577

• OpenGL migration, Mike Erwin works on converting old matrix code. It has to be done all at once
  so it’s not a project volunteers can help with.

3. Other projects and GSoC

• Anyone who knows universities with strong CG departments, send them over to blender.org.
  There is a frontpage link to the GSoC page.

Regards,

-Ton-

[erickBlender]

Just in case you didn’t notice it, the DPI had changed its place, it is not anymore under System ->general-> DPI is now under interface -> display-> scale with ctrl+shift+U

[DKesserich]

Is there a test build of the OpenHMD branch anywhere? From the sounds of that review thread my initial feeling that OpenHMD was nowhere near mature enough to form the backbone of Blender’s VR support was correct, but I’d like to give it a spin.

I’ve actually been using cedeon’s Vive branch of Dalai’s VR viewport add-on, and it works almost perfectly.

[erickBlender]

@DKesserich

Is there a test build of the OpenHMD branch anywhere? From the sounds of that review thread my initial feeling that OpenHMD was nowhere near mature enough to form the backbone of Blender’s VR support was correct, but I’d like to give it a spin.

I’ve actually been using cedeon’s Vive branch of Dalai’s VR viewport add-on, and it works almost perfectly.

Always check graphicall first, http://graphicall.org/1212

[DKesserich]

Thanks!

And yeah, it is not in any way shape or form ready for primetime. Not supporting Direct mode is an immediate fail. FOV on Vive is wrong, IPD is wrong (image convergence is impossible), there’s no positional tracking, framerate is terrible. There’s no apparent way to pan or rotate the HMD view.

The only thing it has over the Dalai/Cedeon add-on is that the 3D cursor and the manipulator handles are visible in the HMD, but since there’s no visible mouse pointer in-hmd having them there doesn’t serve any purpose.

I’d rather see the add-on polished up and added as a built-in add-on than this.

Or if any of the powers that be with Blender are serious about VR support, talk to the BlendFX people, because they seem to have a very robust Blender VR implementation (based on their twitter and instagram. It’s entirely possible that their in-headset performance ain’t great.)

[Sackadoo (fastload64)]

How about an image preview in the Image Texture node so that when there’s more than one, it’s easier (and far faster) to tell them apart?

[LazyDodo]

@DKesserich

Is there a test build of the OpenHMD branch anywhere? From the sounds of that review thread my initial feeling that OpenHMD was nowhere near mature enough to form the backbone of Blender’s VR support was correct, but I’d like to give it a spin.

I’ve actually been using cedeon’s Vive branch of Dalai’s VR viewport add-on, and it works almost perfectly.

I was waiting on the docs to be finalized before i shared my graphicall buid, they are now available here . But will start a separate thread for the vr build, not to cause too much distraction in this one.

[TheOnlyJoey]

@DKesserich

Thanks!

And yeah, it is not in any way shape or form ready for primetime. Not supporting Direct mode is an immediate fail. FOV on Vive is wrong, IPD is wrong (image convergence is impossible), there’s no positional tracking, framerate is terrible. There’s no apparent way to pan or rotate the HMD view.

The only thing it has over the Dalai/Cedeon add-on is that the 3D cursor and the manipulator handles are visible in the HMD, but since there’s no visible mouse pointer in-hmd having them there doesn’t serve any purpose.

I’d rather see the add-on polished up and added as a built-in add-on than this.

Or if any of the powers that be with Blender are serious about VR support, talk to the BlendFX people, because they seem to have a very robust Blender VR implementation (based on their twitter and instagram. It’s entirely possible that their in-headset performance ain’t great.)

Thanks for testing, I am one of the developers of the HMD integration and would like to give some insights.

Direct Mode is a difficult thing, not all HMD’s support this, and since our implementation has support for a wide array of devices (for this current build, Oculus (DK1, DK2, CV1), PSVR, Deepoon E2 and (experimental) HTC Vive), since this is also not supported on all platforms Blender supports (direct mode on Linux is still in early development, and no implementation on macOS at all) when implemented, would be optional in any case. We are getting access to Direct Mode soon and will implement the moment we get our hands on it, but are waiting for the GPU vendors to send the source. (this is a complicated process).

The Vive is currently still in development and not as mature as the other devices, we have a set of patches in testing right now that will fix the FoV/IPD issue and improve tracking.

The issue of positional tracking is a per-case if we can support that or not, for the Vive work is made on this (controllers and basic lighthouse data is already getting there, but is a complicated math heavy job).
Due to dependency issues (some libs can not be introduces as dependency in Blender), devices like Oculus and other usb camera based systems will not get positional support, even when this is implemented in OpenHMD.

Virtual mouse representation was on the to-do list already, expect it to be pushed in a day or two.

Most testing have been done with the Oculus DK2, PSVR and Deepoon E2 on Linux and work pretty well.

Bit of background information, originally about a year ago we started with Dalai’s VR add-on but moved away from it pretty fast due to the dependency on Windows, license issues with multiple SDK implementations and bad performance on our test systems.
A native C implementation was needed to get the performance and correct tracking that was up to the standards.

A lot of additional work will go into improving the devices and optimizing the experience and workflow.

[masterxeon1001]

very excited with the VR progress. I hope someday to see those controllers in blender with some pie menus popping out among other things. Truly the future!

[Asmund (Åsmund)]

Do we have any release date?

[Richard_Marklew]

Blender Developer Meeting Notes for Sunday 2nd April 2017 https://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2017-April/048257.html

Hi all,

Here are the noties from today’s 14 UTC meeting in irc.freenode.net #blendercoders.

1. Blender 2.79 targets

• Updated the targets:
  https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.7

• We are still waiting for three targets to be submitted for review or to be approved.
  These are:

• Cycles Denoiser: will become a hidden experimental feature at first. Lukas Stockner still has
  to make a good user doc with best practices examples!

• Filmic Blender: status undefined yet, Sergey Sharybin will check.

• OpenHMD (VR support in viewport): reviews are mixed. Question is whether this would
  be ready for a release, or whether it’s better to be an active branch with test builds.
  More reviews will be done. Coder Joey Ferwerda will meet with Dalai Felinto and Sergey to review it.
  If no consensus exists about adding OpenHMD in the release, the bf-blender project administrators
  will decide (Bastien, Sergey, Campbell, Ton).

• Option: we can extend the BCon3 deadline (targets in master) a couple of weeks more if needed.

2. Blender 2.8

• I’m happy to announce that Aleph Objects (makers of Lulzbot 3D printer) confirmed to support
  two full time developers on blender 2.8 workflow and the “101” project.
  The key developers for this will be Campbell Barton and Bastien Montagne.
  This means that the Development Fund has room to support new developers, especially for 2.79 topics.

3. Other projects

• Google Summer of Code deadline is Monday 3 April 16h UTC.
  https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/GoogleSummerOfCode/2017

Thanks,

-Ton-

[oris]

• I’m happy to announce that Aleph Objects (makers of Lulzbot 3D printer) confirmed to support
  two full time developers on blender 2.8 workflow and the “101” project.
  The key developers for this will be Campbell Barton and Bastien Montagne.
  This means that the Development Fund has room to support new developers, especially for 2.79 topics.

so, is mike pan still working on 101 project?