Joe is doing excellent work. Blender sculpt has seen tremendous improvement since he come on board.
A year? Lets hope. I would have thought Multires would come first before dynotopo considering the fact its more friendly performance and workflow wise but if I remember they would have to rewrite everything from the ground up or something like that.
Yeah, I am aware of that method, but when you are working on like 200 meshes, that becomes a pain, compared to just having Multires on each mesh. Baking is easier too.
I am hoping Blender higher ups hire an extra one or 2 devs to help Joe. He canāt be working on this alone.
Theyāve decided to work with current multirez and fix it instead of rewriting from the scratch. I also thought Multires should have taken the priority, but Dyntopo refactor is also benefiting Multires, Joe had to do a lot of work that goes beyond Dyntopo and revamps Sculpt mode in general. New auto-save, some files have been rewritten for C++, he also changed how data is saved and etc. This kind of work isnāt flashy now, but groundwork is being laid that will be benefitial. Only problem is lack of other developers.
That I donāt know. They donāt have a job opening for this module. They have for character animation, geonodes and render. This module is currently just not a priority for Blender institute sadly, and core devs are also not committing to it this year at least.
I also noticed that main developers of Geometry Nodes are not working on anything else. Core Blender devs, you can see on Blender youtube vlogs, are working on A LOT. Web development, event planning, office stuff, studio work. They maintain Blender in its entirety. While (as far as I know) Geonodes developers only develop and thatās it. And that speeds things up a lot. For example past week has been little slow in development because of I think Annecy festival.
Iām not criticizing developers btw this is not a bad thing, but I might kidnap one of Geonodes developers and force them to fix this module you never know. Theyāre really good.
Kinda sad to know. I think I will have to give up on Multires vertex paint and face set support. I have been asking for it for the past 4 years now.
Its always the flashy stuff they focus on. I understand this is required in order to garner support for donations which Blender needs to survive on. Look at how long it took for us to get light linking.
Having said that, if any of the Blender higher ups are reading this, pls get an assistant dev to help Joe work on sculpt mode. He shouldnāt be doing everything himself considering the workload.
IMO I donāt think itās just a matter of not wanting to hire someone else. Finding good developers that understand about sculpting seems to be really hard, if we think about how few sculpting programs exists overallā¦ And add to that the fact that they would also have to understand the Blender code. I think itās a tricky position to fill, even if they wanted to.
But currently there is no job ad for a sculpt dev with one person working on it carrying the whole workload but there are job ads for geometry nodes, render, and character animation.
So are they actually trying to find someone else?
Normad Sculpt is developed by one person, I think. Sadly, it does not have a desktop version. Thats why I am wondering if we are better off having a seperate Blender sculpting app. I guess we will have to be patient till next year maybe Blender doesnāt have funds for sculpt development at the moment.
Sculpting apps are curious thing. I guess a lot of people consider that to be the future of the field and it makes sense, itās more artistic-friendly and portable. Pablo is working on iPad app too. Just imagine what he couldāve done with Blender Apps projectā¦
Developers who are at the needed skill level to work on Sculpt Modeās highly complex code (core stuff, not brushes and UI) are not exactly pouring out of colleges by the thousands, so the BF canāt just throw more developers at the problem.
It is the same reason why it took the BF many months to fill the position they had for a Cycles engineer.
Thanks for the explanation but at least, they had a job ad open for that Cycles engineer before it was filled. It is also possible they might be looking for without a job ad being placed on Blenderās website so Joe might be getting some help soon
Thanks for the kind words. I think sculpt mode will attract more developers once we do more code refactors. On the topic of multires attributes like paint or face sets, thatās actually more a problem of getting all the relevant developers to sign off on a design. Code-wise it would be fairly simple to implement (Pablo de Barro did actually have a vertex colors implementation for multires).
I was involved in the ānewā edit mode 10 years ago (that was back when Blender only supported triangles and quads). Geoffry Bantle wrote the core data structure (BMesh); I took that and rewrote all the old edit mode tools to use it. I also wrote the knife tool.
BMesh was subsequently used by Nicholas Bishop to code Dyntopo. BMesh has also been used for the bevel modifier (I believe several people contributed to that) as well as booleans.
At this point Iāve rewritten most of Nicholasās code but the core design concepts are still there. His approach to subdivision ultimately proved to be ideal; the rather large amount of time I spent the past 2 years trying to improve upon it ultimately went nowhere.
When you say problem you mean thereās a debate and some developers arenāt ok with the design? or that design doesnāt exist yet and needs to be fleshed out?
I have noticed, following development last year, that usually thatās the case, design discussions are much larger portion of feature implementation than coding. By far. But so far I havenāt seen a design choice I didnāt agree with so itās worth the wait I guess.
