Advertisement

You're blocking ads, which pay for BlenderNation. Read about other ways to support us.

Developer Meeting Notes, December 11, 2011

20

We're at BCon5: "highest alert phase, release imminent"! Awesome :)

Ton Roosendaal writes:

Short meeting today, we're ready for a release! Here's the summary of today's topics:

1) Blender 2.61

  • Checked with developers on state of Cycles, Ocean sim, Camera tracking and Dynamic paint. No showstoppers, no urgent bugs in the tracker.
  • That means we enter BCon5 now: "highest alert phase, release imminent"!
  • Ton likes to make a zip download with 2.61 demo files. The more the better! Here's the people who will collect the files today/tomorrow:
    • Thomas Dinges, Cycles
    • Sergey Sharybin, Tracking
    • Lukas Toenne, Ocean sim
    • Miika Hamalainen, Dynamic paint
  • Everyone: help checking on the last weeks of commits. Let's prevent to need to do another 'a' release, just because of lack of code reviewing :)

2) Other projects

  • No news really... apart from Mango team line-up.
  • Mango developer crew and code sprint is still undefined, should be solved soon.

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

20 Comments

    • I agree, I still wonder why OpenCL was not the first to be supported, I mean openCL is compatible with Nvidia, AMD and CPUs, but CUDA is only for Nvidia Cards.. If Blender needs more funds to support AMD, I'll participate for sure !

        • He is refering to the new drivers that are supposed to fix the OpenCL problems, and what the state of OpenCL is now that there are supposed to be new drivers. If you look at the Blender Cycles Mailing list, you will see that they have resumed debugging cycles for OSX/ATI, which is OpenCL. So the work has begun, and hopefully there will be no more OpenCL bugs like the last one.

  1. Just a small tidbit.  If the line "BCon5: ”highest alert phase, release imminent”!" is supposed to mimic the US military's DEFCON system, then it should say "BCon1."  Level five is the lowest state of readiness in the military's DEFCON system with level one being the highest.

  2. Cycle is the tool I was waiting for, for a long long time. I use it now in my everyday work. But I'll be frank that for the first time I have a quite mix feeling with an upcoming release. Testing the release candidate did confirm my fears that I would not be able to use GPU for rendering, though I have a graphic that can support nearly all the recent games. I have an Nviadia Geforce 8600 GT with 256 of ram. I'll have to invest in a new graphic card which is really a bad news and thats not going to be for tomorrow.

    I would like to support an idea that I saw in a forum recently. It would be kool if after the realase of 2.62 and hoping that Bmesh is gonna be in there, that the DEVs pass some time in just making Blender really stable. With each new realease we have new great tools which is great, but we also have a lot of new bugs.

    I'm really greateful for all that Tom and the Devs are doing. I know that pleasing everyone is not possible :). But I think that many blender users are in the same situation as me.

    Hope that you all have a nice day...

    • Man, if you have a gfx card with 256MB of RAM dont say " I have a graphic that can support nearly all the recent games."  Most of RECENT games will ask you for 512MB of RAM not to mention all effects like tessellation and support for new DX that you dont have on older card.
      I have at the moment because my OLD GF9800 with 1GB RAM died and I had to replace it wit GF6800 256MB of RAM temporarily so I have an idea how is it. Sooner or later you will have to buy new card - dont make such big deal out of it - prices of new cards are not so crazy. You dont have to go with latest model after all. 

    • Cycles needs power, lots of it. On my 3 year old PC (Core2Quad 3.0 GHz), rendering an animation using Cycles is unthinkable, so I'm going to need a new i7 + very hot 2GB graphics card - and even then animation probably won't be possible.

      As for 'stop and stabilise', I think that's a very good idea. Blender must remain incredibly stable and slick to maintain respect, and adding too many features at once could also lead to inconsistency, not just bugs. Give those hardworking devs some time to 'polish' their work!

      • You don't need so much power, really, the only thing you really going to need is the nvidia card. My system is an old core duo (older than conroe)  and can do marvels with my GT 430, and albeit not that fast, is pretty decent, and the price is right.

    • I think a stop and stabilise and clean-up is necessary in all programmes. 

      I personally think 2.65 is a nice figure to stabilise and clean-up Blender code. An make that standard for every 5 or so releases.

Leave A Reply

To add a profile picture to your message, register your email address with Gravatar.com. To protect your email address, create an account on BlenderNation and log in when posting a message.

Advertisement

×