Developer Meeting Notes

General Forums Blender Development Discussion
1981

Hi, Lukas Stockner add a new compression method to Blender, it is multithreaded for loading.

https://developer.blender.org/D5799

It is not backward compatible, meant you cant open compressed files with older Blender version.
It is in master now, next build will include it and I guess I post here instead of add new thread.

Cheers, mib

7 Likes
1982

23 August 2021

Announcements

Modules & Projects

New Features and Changes

File Compression

  • Add support for Zstandard compression for .blend files (commit , commit ) (Lukas Stockner)
  • Use Zstandard compression for the sequencer cache (commit ) (Lukas Stockner)

User Interface

  • Remove “Unfitted” Kerning Style Option (commit ) (Harley Acheson)
  • Various performance improvements and refactors to font caching (commit , commit , commit, commit) (Harley Acheson, Campbell Barton)

Grease Pencil

  • Copy vertex groups when converting to Grease Pencil from mesh (commit ) (Henrik Dick)

Library Overrides

Cycles/Alembic Procedural

  • Option to always add a cache reader when importing (commit ) (Kévin Dietrich)
  • Experimental integration of Alembic procedural in cycles viewport rendering (commit ) (Kévin Dietrich)
    • Only subdivide if subsurf modifier is present (commit ) (Kévin Dietrich)
    • Basic cache control settings (commit ) (Kévin Dietrich)
  • Cycles: avoid copying vertex normals attribute twice to the devices (commit) (Kévin Dietrich)

Geometry Nodes

  • Add shader Color Mix node (commit ) (Charlie Jolly)
  • Add UV Smooth, Boundary Smooth options to subdivision node (commit ) (Eitan)

Texture Painting

  • Support tile sets that do not start at 1001 (commit ) (Jesse Yurkovich)

Video Sequence Editor

  • Significantly improve drawing of audio waveforms (commit ) (Sebastian Parborg)

Virtual Reality

  • Adjustments and improvements to color depth (commit ) (Peter Kim)

Weekly Reports

Summary
5 Likes
1983

Seems like something that Blender Bob complained about in one of his videos is now fixed. :grin:

Curious if the video had any effect on bringing this issues in front of developers.

6 Likes
1984

Yay ! Materials are overridable ! That’s a huge step for animation production. And for mankind.

9 Likes
1985

I’ve been waiting for a long time for this too. Don’t have the time to test alpha builds now. Does it work reliably?

1986

So I just tried it, clicked “make single-user copy” in the material datablock of a linked object (part of a character rig), and it was not kept after reload. On second try (clicking “make single-user copy” again), it did keep the copied (local) material linked to the object, however the material dropdown didn’t work anymore (impossible to expand). So I’m not sure. I just tested this quickly, maybe I’m going at it the wrong way. Maybe Bastien isn’t done with the changes ?

1987

Doubtfull, the patch is from external dev and in the works since the begining of July. But sure is a nice fix. And for the materials override, not always works ATM. Is testing and bug reporting season, then. (well… is in alpha state, what do you people expected?? a perfect shoot in the first try for a multiyear developed feature??. :wink: )

1988

Pretty important changes are happening to polish UDIMs user expirience. I’d recommend to visit this thread and voice your opinion if it impacts your expirience one way or the other.

6 Likes
1989

Welcomes

Announcements

  • Google Summer of Code is officially over. All the projects passed the final evaluation (congratulations everyone!).
  • Clément Foucault is going to be in the Blender HQ (Amsterdam) for EEVEE and viewport planning and design sections - original plan September 20-24.

Modules & Projects

  • Geometry Nodes latest development is happening in the branch temp-geometry-nodes-fields .
    • There is not much difference from master there yet.

New Features and Changes

User Interface

  • Consistent area move snapping locations (commit ) (Harley Acheson)
  • Node Editor
    • Improvements and fixes for edge panning (commit ) (Lukas Tönne)
    • Reduce node contents jiggling when transforming nodes (commit ) (Harley Acheson)
  • Disable Fade Inactive Geometry overlay by default (commit ) (Pablo Dobarro)

Geometry Nodes

  • Curve fill node (commit ) (Erik Abrahamsson)
  • Enhance the cube mesh primitive as a cuboid (commit ) (Rajesh Advani)
  • Allow for one vertex in grid node (commit ) (Mattias Fredriksson)

Video Sequence Editor

  • Add transform overwrite mode to replace strips instead of moving them(commit ) (Richard Antalik)
  • Set default sound and video export format (commit ) (Richard Antalik)

Modifiers

  • Support smooth interpolation in the mask modifier (commit ) (Henrik Dick)

Asset Browser

  • Reduce loading times when extracting thumbnails from Blendfiles. (commit ) (Jeroen Bakker)

Python API

  • Refactor the way IDProperties store data for the UI with a proper API (commit ) (Hans Goudey)
  • Expose GPU clip distances (commit ) (Germano Cavalcante)

Weekly Reports

Summary
11 Likes
1990

:clap: :clap: :clap:

That’s nice to hear! Congrats all around.

7 Likes
1991

Nice to hear this too

1992

https://developer.blender.org/diffusion/B/history/eevee-rewrite/

1993

Last update on 20 juli… :confused:
Or am I missing something?

1994

I’m not following development extensively but form what i can see Clément seems to work on his local branch and then he commit patch out of nowhere like AO and FOV rewrites.

Anyway, what is known for eevee-rewrite?
From “GBuffer” word i guess he’s converting forward (forward+?) rendering path to deferred.
But what more?

1995

I once went through all available commits on January 25 to see what was made at a time. I’ll just quote my whole comment.

3 Likes
1996

Announcements

Modules & Projects

Rendering Meeting Notes

Cycles

  • Cycles X: Brecht is working on optimizations for the AO pass and revamping the sampling settings. Sergey continues work on tiled and resumable rendering. Jeroen also helps with direct display of render buffers without copy to Blender. Plans is to merge this into master in about 3 weeks from now (September 20), when the 3.0 like merge window is likely to close.
  • Random walk SSS: various tweaks for this have been committed. Brecht is still investigating improved handling of self-intersecting meshes. Christophe mentions trace sets and an option for the number of intersections until the exit point can also help.
  • Manifold next event estimation: code is still being cleaned up.
  • AMD HIP support: initial feedback given by Brecht, William and Jeroen. Changes were so the kernel side code could be mostly deduplicated with CUDA. Host side is still duplicating a fair amount of code, may be possible to solve this but not a condition for merging. Plan to post a public patch soon in time for the 3.0 release, however drivers and compiler will not be available yet at that time. Since this can be disabled by default with a build option it’s fine to continue development like this in cycles-x/master to make things easier.
  • CMJ sampling: William investigated this more, and arrived at various patterns that are similar to Sobol in terms of performance/noise for a production scene. Mainly what we need here still is to validate this on a few more benchmark scenes.
    Animation denoising has not been reviewed yet. We expect there is significant overlap with the work Sergey is doing regarding saving intermediate EXR files, that should simplify this.
    A blog post regarding the Facebook collaboration is being worked on, Kévin has a draft, he will share it with others involved.

Eevee & Viewport

  • OpenSubdiv patch is being submitted soon by Kévin. Campbell volunteered to review it.
  • Clément comes to Amsterdam soon to discuss plans regarding Eevee 2.0, Vulkan and viewport compositing. Note these features are not going to make it for Blender 3.0.

New Features and Changes

Compositor

  • New Posterize Node to limit number of values in each color channel (commit ) (Aaron Carlisle)
  • Improve performance by merging equal operations (commit ) (Manuel Castilla)

Mesh Editing

  • BMesh: Optimize edge and face group calculation (commit ) (Mikkel Gjoel)

User Interface

  • Add support for restricting measure tool dimensions to one axis (commit ) (Erik Abrahamsson)
  • Split output properties dimensions panel (commit ) (Aaron Carlisle)
  • Show the UDIM UV grid even when images are loaded (commit ) (Jesse Yurkovich)
  • Sync the active texture with the node editor and image editor (commit , commit) (Philipp Oeser)
  • Increase display size of Blend file thumbnails (commit ) (Harley Acheson)

Grease Pencil

  • Smooth thickness when joining strokes (commit ) (Antonio Vazquez)
  • Change default Scale Thickness to True in 2D template (commit ) (Antonio Vazquez)

Python API

  • Allow closing areas with scripting (commit ) (Harley Acheson)
  • File Browser
    • Expose list of selected files in context (commit) (Julian Eisel)
    • Expose relative path of a file (commit) (Julian Eisel)
  • Add read-only ‘is_valid’ attribute to mathutils types (commit) (Campbell Barton)

Weekly Reports

Summary
3 Likes
1997

Too soon… :wink:

1 Like
1998

13 September 2021

Notes for weekly communication of ongoing projects and modules.

New Features and Changes

Geometry Nodes

  • Initial version of fields and anonymous attributes (commit ) (Jacques Lucke, Hans Goudey)
    • Update socket inspection for the field inputs and outputs (commit ) (Jacques Lucke)
    • For now, the changes are hidden behind an experimental option
  • Support instancing geometry created directly in the node tree (commit ) (Jacques Lucke)
  • Support geometry nodes modifier on curve objects (commit ) (Hans Goudey)
  • Add “Evaluated” mode to Resample Curve node (commit ) (Hans Goudey)
  • Allow exposing color sockets to the modifier (commit ) (Hans Goudey)

Asset Browser

  • Dropping Material assets on material slot under mouse cursor. (commit ) (Jeroen Bakker)

User Interface

  • Add “Screenshot” option for Blend file preview thumbnails (commit ) (Harley Acheson)
  • Improve mouse cursor feedback when unable to join areas (commit ) (Harley Acheson)
  • Improve naming for quad-view options (commit ) (Nikhil Shringarpurey)
  • Use updated icons for grease pencil line art and length modifiers (commit ) (Antonio Vazquez)

Modifiers

  • Export motion blur velocity with a named attribute (commit ) (Brecht Van Lommel)
  • Improve fluid modifier baking performance with multithreading (commit ) (Erik Abrahamsson)
  • Mesh Cache Modifier: Add support for vertex groups (commit ) (Maxime Casas)

Virtual Reality

  • Re-enable SteamVR OpenGL backend for AMD gpus (commit ) (Peter Kim)
  • Support for Varjo OpenXR extensions (commit ) (Ville Kivistö)

Video Sequence Editor

  • Add a panning angle for multichannel audio (commit ) (Jörg Müller)

Animation

  • Optimize keyframe drawing by improving data structures (commit ) (Jeroen Bakker)
  • Enable multithreading for drawing of keyframes (commit ) (Jeroen Bakker)

Weekly Reports

Summary

P.S.: How do people get those links in those preview-rectangles?

6 Likes
1999

You mean oneboxing?

If you paste a link on it’s own new line and if the content of the linked page can be oneboxed then it automatically gets oneboxed.

1 Like
2000

Notes for weekly communication of ongoing projects and modules.

Announcements

  • Clément Foucault is in Amsterdam for a week long workshop about EEVEE plans.

Blender 3.0

  • bcon2 is still planned for Wednesday, 22 September 2021.
  • Some of the big targets are still not merged (cycles-x, geometry nodes fields, …).
  • This will be confirmed again on Wednesday 11:00 CEST on #blender-coders .

Geometry Nodes

  • Curve Objects now support Geometry Nodes modifiers.
  • Hans Goudey wrote an article about curve support in Geometry Nodes highlighting the community contributions.

940×529 98.9 KB

New Features and Changes

Compositor

  • Add OpenImageDenoise prefiltering option to the Denoise node (commit ) (Manuel Castilla)

User Interface

  • Freestyle UI Upgrade (commit ) (Iyad Ahmed)
  • Keep navigation gizmos visible during modal operators (commit ) (Campbell Barton)
  • Automatic Blend file thumbnail type selection (commit ) (Harley Acheson)
  • Wait for input for operators that depend on cursor location (commit ) (Campbell Barton)
    • Expose “Lasso Select” & “Extrude to Cursor” in menus (commit ) (Campbell Barton)
    • Split screenshot area into a separate operator (commit ) (Campbell Barton)
  • Remove menus & show wait cursor when saving (commit ) (Harley Acheson)
  • Various naming and consistency changes (commit , commit ) (Aaron Carlisle, Dalai Felinto)

Geometry Nodes

  • Transfer attributes in the curve to mesh node (commit ) (Hans Goudey)
  • Multi-threaded field evaluation (commit ) (Jacques Lucke)
  • Special domain interpolation for selections (commit ) (Hans Goudey)
  • Fields version of material nodes (commit ) (Hans Goudey)
  • Add a toggle to use attributes as input values in the modifier (commit ) (Hans Goudey)
  • Hide values for selection inputs in the UI (commit ) (Hans Goudey)
  • Hide Attribute Remove node when fields are enabled (commit ) (Jacques Lucke)

Asset Browser

  • Recursive reading of asset libraries in sub-directories (commit ) (Julian Eisel)

Grease Pencil

  • Dot dash modifier to create dashed strokes (commit ) (YimingWu)
  • Line Art: Automatic crease with flat/smooth faces. (commit ) (YimingWu)

Miscellaneous

  • Enable loading video files with audio not matching time and duration (commit ) (Jörg Müller)
  • Python API: Expose the “any” state of KeyMapItem modifiers (commit ) (Campbell Barton)
  • Expose more settings for app templates (commit , commit , commit, commit) (Dalai Felinto)

Weekly Reports

Summary
10 Likes