Compilation of the SoC project about GLSL Preview

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Google SOC 2007A new compilation is available at graphicall.org, with a preview of the new GLSL visualization system. This is an ongoing development project supported by SoC 2007, and will be a great addition to Blender. But what`s this project about? The goal is to improve the display of materials in the 3D View.

The compilation has been provided by Lguillaume, at graphicall.org. You can download it here. Just remember to activate the GLSL preview in the User Preferences Window, at the System & OpenGL tab there is a button called GLSL Preview. You must activate it to use the preview system.

BN GLSL

If you want to know more about this project, visit this web page which has all the information about the development. Visit this thread at Blenderartists, to view how some users are using this new tool.

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    • http://gordallott.wordpress.com gord

      neat :) just for anyone thats confused this aims to get the models that you work with in blender to look the same as the ones you render instead of there being huge differences in the lighting and such :)

    • http://www.konrad-haenel.de konrad_ha

      Wow! That looks very promising. Just thinking of the next Blender release sends shivers down my spine.

    • http://thebigdavec.googlepages.com DaveC

      I’m very sad :( My computer has no GLSL shader support. Great work though, I imagine.

    • dmh_mac

      Slightly off topic, but I think it’s common practice to call this a build, instead of a compilation… (It was confusing)

    • http://www.zanqdo.com ZanQdo
    • Yellow

      Great stuff!

      To see the other SOC projects you can go to this link and click on the headings:

      http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BlenderDev/SummerOfCode2007

      The following link takes you to browse blender projects SVN and you can see at the bottom the SOC projects and activity on commits for each SOC project.

      http://projects.blender.org/plugins/scmsvn/viewcvs.php/branches/?root=bf-blender

      It’s pretty easy to jump in and build any of the SOC projects from SVN with SCONS (For Linux that is).

      Although the only other one that looks usuable so far is the bevel modifier.

      It’s all very exciting. :-)

    • tsgfilmwerks

      Is there EVER going to be a new build for Mac OS X PPC?

    • Auria

      Can we see a screenshot of the actual shaders and not of the buttons? there are no builds for my computera and I’d still like to see what it looks like

    • http://www.zanqdo.com ZanQdo

      Auria: check the linux build I added 3 screenshots there, why is BN not linking the linux build?

    • Ken Hursh

      @tsgfilmwerks: I’m feeling the same pain brother. I have vented the same opinion on graphicall…

      Is the ppc side dead? It’s unfortunate because so many of us were supporting this awesome idea since the beginning – but, lately, it feels like we’ve been relegated to the wintel bias (on the mac side). I guess we need to save up some more $ to support the intel front. What a shame. I guess we’re now being dragged down into the intel v. amd pissing match. Yes, it’s a drag. I’ll bet that the next step is the ATI v. nvidia pecker match.

      What I’ve always envisioned oss to be. Great.

      -K

      p.s., no. I’m not going to lay this at Jobs’ doorstep. Take a look back at Stallman’s premise. The GPL is walking very close to being part of a partisan (capital) battle. Are we skipping back to square one?

    • Ken Hursh

      and for the record…not meant to be flame bait.

      It’s just frustration at the “reality” of a seemingly drop of a chip.

      Imagine how YOU would feel if a development effort just “dropped” support on your personal chip.

      Mac people are not insane. Have you ever met an Amiga user? ‘Nuff said.

      -K

      p.s., (again) – I will be buying a powerhouse Mac tower soon…so my lot is going to be for the intel side obviously.

      And nvidia. Is this just plain stupid? is this taking sides? Probably…but, oh well. I have a vision to follow – and this is just such a wanker mentality.

      Blender rules.

    • ccherrett

      Ken Hursh :

      Most mac heads I have met are insane :)

    • Ken Hursh

      ’tis true. :-)

    • http://www.zanqdo.com ZanQdo

      GraphicAll.org’s builds are made by dozens of volunteers all over the world, if you find a weak spot join us and provide PPC builds yourself for the rest of users, thats how it works :)

    • http://www.marketiers.org/ shul

      @Ken: ati v. nvidia is already much into the fight; when amd bought ati nvidia went ‘what?!’ but it looks like ati will continue leaving ‘from inside’ amd in some form or another, so everything is cool, nvidia still has someone to hate.

      the really interesting stuff comes from intel, looks like they watched the amd purchase and decided to develop some 3d accelerated stuff themselves.

      where are the good old days of voodoo? what happened to matrox…

    • http://mpan3.homeip.net/ mike pan

      Sorry to be the one to break the bad news: OSX has a very limits market share right now despite how great it may or may not be (6% according to my website stat, PPC OSX only being 2%), i wouldn’t be surprised if majority of the testing builds are Windows/Linux/MacIntel only.

    • Jacob Randal

      Aww nuts.. I’m still on my Power Mac G5 tower. I finally got Tiger installed on an external Firewire drive too… but getting an intel machine is probably not going to work for me at least for another year. :(

    • Ken Hursh

      My apologies everybody. Sorry to derail the topic here.

      Anyways, it is indeed very cool to see progress being made on this SOC project. This was the one project I was really excited to see make it onto the list.

      From my understanding, in addition to optimizing the live shader previews, isn’t a lot of this being prompted by Eskil’s urging to optimize the OpenGL calls within Blender? And, if so, wouldn’t it stand to reason that this would produce huge leaps in performance?

    • http://freefactory.org Bassam Kurdali

      very cool! I tried the linux build (had to make a simlink to the older gettextlib version linked to by the build) and it worked nicely. This looks very promising and useful. Great job Miguel! PS. @ blendernation: it might be nice if you mention in the article the name of the person who actually did the coding as well as the provider of the windows build ;)
      @Ken Hursh: really there’s no conspiracy, just the fact that noone with a powerpc mac has stepped up and made a build for graphicall- I could as easily complain how powerpc users are freeloaders ! (joke- I don’t mean this at all), but the reality is there’s just fewer people on the platform these days= less builds and attention. Remember, devs can’t really develop effectively for a platform they don’t own, and it’s hard enough for builders to make binaries for their own platforms. Why not learn how to build blender (it’s not hard) and become the saviour of the PPC community?

    • Miguel Torres Lima

      I thought I was going to remain anonymous :). Well the project is still in its early stages. There are some problems with ATI cards, and honestly it is not my fault because ATI’s driver implementation don’t follow the specs. The main problems are that the driver don’t support integers and preprocessor concatenation. I’ve changed the code and tried it in linux and now the driver compiles the shaders but it crashes randomly. I believe it to be a driver’s problem. I asked Lguillaume to make a new windows build so I can test it to find out who is the guilty part, me or the linux ati driver implementation.
      Furthermore, cards under the ATi X series won’t be supported. Some of them support programmable vertex and fragment processors and therefore glsl shading, but the number of arithmetic and logical operations allowed are minimum, not even enough to calculate the effect of one single light.

      Cheers.

    • Ken Hursh

      @Bassam Kurdali: completely agree. It’s just the frustration of seeing ppc going by the wayside so quickly. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still use at least my PBG4 for years to come (it’s been the most dependable cpu I have) – but as far as workstations, I’ll just have to step up, replaced my G5, and get on the intel train (I was just hoping for a little more time ;-). I’m also considering running a dual-boot system – probably ubuntu. I’ll do some preliminary testing for now.

      @Miguel Torres Lima: while I haven’t personally experienced your build, from the docs and the video – I was completely amazed. You are truly inspirational. It is curious about the ATI hiccups…is opengl really not that well implemented? Are they just so completely in bed with DirectX? Well, good luck on finding a solution – and I’m sure with the support in this community, you’ll be able to piece it together.

      -K

    • zapper

      Is this available on Game Engine?

    • Complaintenthusiast #1

      Nice effort. Can’t wait until it actually supports textures – which would essentially be the only reason why the entire system should exist – as without textures, shaded mode is already accurate enough without GLSL if you ask me.