According to this talk, the blender opengl system is rather outdated, build for compatibility for old hardware (and by old i mean really old) rather than performance. Just wondering if anyone is working on the ogl viewport refactor?
hey thats kind of funny i just found that too, its from the 2006 blender conference. Thats what prompted me to download the stuff from uni-verse, like for example Quel Solaar (that realtime renderer used in the video), but it seems very buggy for me
Ton already did some opengl refactor for 2.43 which resulted in significant speed up for certain things - there will likely be more with improvements during the UI refactor and tool api refactor for 2.5 but it is unclear yet exactly what changes can be/should be expected.
LetterRip
LetterRip, do you know which areas specifically were improved in 2.43?
nope,
i think metaball and curves drawing speed, but I can’t think of others off the top of my head…
LetterRip
i am sorta out of the loop when it comes to development, why is everybody keep mentioning the 2.5 release? are we going to jump directly from 2.43 to 2.5?
Also, the GUI refactor, will that bring that significant/visible change to the end user? Or is it more like an API cleanup?
A really useful thing for Opengl visualization could be the possibility to see the change to the specular size for material preview(for sculpting work is really important this),now only the intensity changes,I don’t know how the opengl code works,but I think that should be possible.
Bye
I’d like to see shading while texture painting and possibility of blending two or more textures in textured view. Now I can see only one texture on object and vertex colors at once. It would be very useful while texture painting because now it’s hard to work with silhouette only, but I could add another texture with lightmap or just enable shading on object it would be great.
Yup definitly it will be great to see some layers in texture painting mode and how they interact each others in 3d viewport. Like specularity layer, lightmap layer, diffuse, colour, normal map… etc, etc…
http://projects.blender.org/pipermail/bf-blender-cvs/2006-November/008175.html
http://projects.blender.org/pipermail/bf-blender-cvs/2006-November/008303.html
Two commits that I could find right now.
I’ve always had a suspicion that was the case. When I ran Blender through the OpenGL debugger in OS X, the drawing always seemed to use an excessive amount of resources. As the guy said in the video, you have to do it properly though. If you program it badly then it could end up slower. I did an OpenGL program once and I experimented with display lists and vertex arrays and they didn’t seem to speed things up so I ended up sticking with immediate mode.
I think optimization will come in time but the important thing is functionality. The GLSL shading is also something I wanted to see but I would have liked it if GLSL shaders could be built in the node editor and then at render time, converted into software mode so that programmable GLSL shaders can be hand written and still fully supported.
We really need people like the guy in the video who know about OpenGL to do this though. If the development team don’t know the conventions then you can’t expect them to optimize things.
That demo at the start was brilliant and it’s exactly what I had been thinking about with the node editor. I much prefer the idea of having a fullscreen 3D window and just have panels appear when you need them. Especially with Blender’s node design, it’s not ideal to have the two panels separate. It’s like Apple’s Dashboard, where you hit a key and the property boxes appear in place. Like when you hit the n-key and the property window appears. Well, why stop there? Bring up the node layout in a semi-transparent window.
It’d be cool to incorporate something like this as an option in the realtime display. What a complimentary effect to sculpt mode that would be, eh?
Sorry to sound a little paranoid… but would these plans have an effect on those with less capable hardware?
I blend with a laptop that is only just over a year old, but it has onboard SIS graphics that only support OpenGL 1.4 (and one feature of 1.5, according to Realtech VR OpenGL Extensions Viewer). There’s no sign of SIS releasing any drivers with updated OpenGL features, and in fact at one point they pretty much stated that they were only supplying OpenGL drivers as an afterthought after DirectX. I spare no love for SIS. Rant over. 
This means that, for example, I can’t use some of the new OpenGL shaders in the game engine, which isn’t that much of a problem to me as I’m mainly an animator, but if Blender’s main interface were to get a bit too flashy, it might have problems for some of us - or would these features not be using THAT new functionality?
Its no need to get rid of actual OpenGL renderer, developers can leave it as option. Or code some setting like in 3d games to choose/test your graphic card and choose 3d render options.
Yup really nice.
I would say the most important feture is stablity!
As it stands its probably one of the most stable 3d apps at realease out there (Others will argure). So I have it on everything from a 750MHz AMD with 300MB ram and a GeForce 256 (Thats the one after the TNT2 oh I have one of those too), to a 7900 GS?? (whatever) with AMD64 X2 5000+. I use Slackware, Suse, Gentoo, Redhat …
Everythime I download, untar, run. Its GREAT. This “feture” for the opengl pipeline is the most important. IMO
They shouldn’t. The guy in the video covered that. Basically, the baseline speed ups should be supported by practically every card in existance and a lot of functionality comes from the drivers themselves, not just the card. So if the drivers are sufficiently up to date, there should be no problems. Also, any functionality that is dependent on specific hardware can easily check to see if it’s available.
updating the viewport renderer to be optimized for new OGL implementations shouldn’t do anything to harm the stability. In fact, it we do it correctly, the new engine will be faster and more compatible with certain (ATI) cards and drivers.
Blending in textured view, I’d also like to see that.
As for shading while texture painting have you tried positioning lights and going to texture paint mode in the textured view (not shaded view). I’ve done that before and you do see shading while painting your textures.