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Developer Meeting Notes, May 20, 2012

57

The preliminary release date for Blender 2.64 has been set at end of June!

Ton Roosendaal writes:

1) Targets for next release, 2.64

  • Proposal for BCON schedule & targets.
  • Nicholas Bishop: Skin Modifier is finished, ready for code review.
  • Daniel Genrich might be pushing another update for cloth collisions. Also working on smoke simulation (to allow animation inside domains).
  • Joshua Leung: three things he'd like to do: better action user-count management tools, revisiting the channel grouping stuff, and tinkering with getting the 'armature' mode in mask modifier functional. Will fit in BCON schedule (ready before June 17),
  • Targets added for 2.64: Planar tracking, Curve masks.
  • Meeting discussed color pipeline and OCIO. For project Mango it's definitely needed, but the precise specs for a 2.64 release have to be evaluated still. Brecht van Lommel likes to see at least an OCIO LUT node in compositor for converting files. Next week a proposal should be ready.
  • Are there more branches who likes to get in? Ton Roosendaal mails Tamito Kajiyama about the freestyle branch.
  • Keying (greenscreen) improvement: four devs are currently looking into this (Sergey S, Keir M, Bob H, Pete L).
  • BSurfaces script is now GPL, should be checked and added to default collection. Brendon Murphy checks on this with developer Eclectiel L.

2) Google Summer of Code

Tomorrow it starts! For all students here's a minimal checklist:

  1. Get in contact with the mentor
  2. Put original proposal in our wiki
  3. Start work on design doc this week

Also put some efforts in finding the people who will use your work, for example via an introduction of your work at blenderartists.org

Thanks,

-Ton-

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.

57 Comments

  1. "Also put some efforts in finding the people who will use your work, for
    example via an introduction of your work at blenderartists.org"

    perhaps this is something that can be echoed here on blendernation.com

  2. I like new BMesh Blender VERY MUCH (it is a real milestone and best major improvement), but some modelling tools still would deserve some tuning (knife, vertex slide, ...). Are there some plans for these?

    Thanks for the constant great work!

    • Kirill Poltavets on

      I hope for the new Vertex Slide will be faster. Old Chromoly's version worked without acception on a slide direction - just move your mouse in different ways and click. Now you're choosing 1st and only then you'r sliding. If you want to choose another direction (after choosing) you must Esc then repeat Vertex Slide. IMHO - it's too slow way.

      •  ...and other than that:
        1. there is no numeric input, which is sometimes a must (and it is inconsistent to other tools)
        2. no UV preserve function :(

    • Developing brand new features takes time, I'd guess it'll still be a few releases before the asset library is ready to go.

  3. EXTRAORDINARY EFFORT of the developers all this years! Thank you/Muchas gracias for this incredible tool.

  4. Philip Witte on

    Skin modifier looks amazing for sculpting! Has anyone heard any news on Unlimited Clay?

    Great works, folks!

  5. Hi all, before talking about new features to add, I think the most important thing is to fix bugs, some modifiers are not working (boolean for example), particles is very buggy.. they were working before and even if all the work is done by volunteers, nice persons, I just can say it's not a good thing to go forward and let bugs like that. I would like to use a stable Blender with no bugs or at least minors, but some bugs just make Blender crashes or stops you in your work.
    I hope all developers will keep doing good work, I am a developer also but not in python so I cannot help but I know it's sometimes really hard to fix bugs, and it takes a lot of time, so Thank you.

    •  Blender is coded in C mostly.
      There's a lot of bug fixing going on sir. Do you report those bugs that you find ? If you are a dev you should be able to be of a great help. Thank you. :)

      • I know that Blender is mostly in C, but it's again not my cup of tea, I do PHP and JAVA, I've read a book to learn Python but never made a program and have no experience in 3D coding, I tried to open for example the MOD_bevel.py to understand maybe something but It was a litlle bit hard.

        I do report bugs of course cause nobody will do it for me, I did for the boolean modifier I was talking about and other stuffs. I love Blender, my only wish is to see it becoming better than other commercial softwares, I am sure if one day I can help coding I will do believe me, but for now it's more a dream than other thing, so the only thing I can do like others like me is to help by submitting bugs and encouraging developers to go forward and thanks them, sometimes I donate too.

        Cheers.

        Karl.S (registered on the bug-tracker).

        • Yeah, those pesky Boolean bugs. Unless they are really simple, Maya crashes all the time with booleans, or just sits there forever.

  6. I know this is of topic, but anyone know whats happend to the BlenderGuru website?

    It has an Account Suspended sign on it.

      •  The website is unavailable since yesterday, or the day be for, but "content" changed from 404 (not found) to something about sever maintainance to 403 (forbidden) to this actual situation we have now. (with this account suspendedd thing)

        but thenatureacademy.blenderguru.com is still online! (I have no account there, just checked that)

        and all the Tutorials are still available on Vimeo and Youtube, so not thaat bad :)

          •  Well, that's fine, but for us that paid him $300 dollars for the Nature Academy, I would think that he'd have paid extra for the memory on the servers.  A lot of people who've paid like me are out of luck until the problem gets fixed. 

          •  I work in IT and these things happen.  You can't really be pin it on Andrew, if there was a problem then the web host should have given him ample warning about this which they never do.  I'm sure he'll see you right, it will only be a slight delay and in the meantime you can always while away your time practising in blender.  I'm sure he is doing everything in his power to resolve the situation.

    • Well, it's a bit like a Dr. Seuss story-- it could be this, it could be that, or it could be green ham and eggs.

      Regardless of the actual problem I would have thought that Andrew would have an email account with the addresses of at least his loyal subscribers and pushed out an email explaining the problem.

      Andrew seems to be a honest sport, so I'm sure whatever happened is beyond his control.

  7. great progess as usual:)
    nice to get bsurfaces into trunk!

    would love to see the viewport performance in focus.
    atm its one major reason why using max/vray for big scenes (20 mio poly) at work.

    • Hi,
      I would be more than interested in cycle developments : volume shader and smoke within blender cycle ???

  8. hola desde colombia, no hablo ingles, pero el traductor de chrome si lo hace, primero que todo es mi primera publicacion, tengo varias cosas por decir, lo primero es que llevo mas de 8 meses con blender y me parece que es el mejor softwar de todos, ya que te reune todo en uno solo, segundo con respecto a los cycles que noticias hay de un desarrollo para el humo, ya que me parece que cycles en estos momentos le a dado muy duro a los otros softwares, por su increible rapidez y realismo, tres creo que ya es hora de modificar un poco la vista de blender, bueno lo digo por lo de los iconos, aunque me defiendo muy bien con los atajos de comandos, pero creo que agregando iconos en la vista 3d le refresca la apariencia a blender.

    • INGLES man ! Nadie te va a parar bolas con el espanol. Ve a GOOGLE TRANSLATOR type your text click on translate and then copy and paste your result. Then post it ! Same if someone replies you !

      Si quizas sea bueno agregar iconos y usar menos los shortcuts? El problema es que hace la interfaz mas busy for your eyes....I guess so !

      Saludos

      • tengo varias cosas por decir, lo primero es que llevo mas de 8 meses con blender y me parece que es el mejor softwar de todos, ya que te reune todo en uno solo, segundo con respecto a los cycles que noticias hay de un desarrollo para el humo, ya que me parece que cycles en estos momentos le a dado muy duro a los otros softwares, por su increible rapidez y realismo, tres creo que ya es hora de modificar un poco la vista de blender, bueno lo digo por lo de los iconos, aunque me defiendo muy bien con los atajos de comandos, pero creo que agregando iconos en la vista 3d le refresca la apariencia a blender. por favor disculpar el mal ingles use el traductor de google

      • I have several things to say, the first thing is that I have more than 8 months and I thinkblender is the best softwar of all, and meet you all in one, second with respect to thecycles that news from a development for smoke, because I think that cycles at the moment has given him very hard for other software, for its incredible speed and realism, three I think it's time to change the view a little blender, well I say so of icons, but I defend myself very well with command shortcuts, but I think adding icons in the 3D view itrefreshes the appearance blender. Please excuse the bad English use google translator

  9. I really like all new stuff around as bmesh but could be ngons highlighted by different colour of faces in edit mode ?

    • If you just need to find all ngons in your mesh, go to "Select" menu, command "By Number of Verts" and (in the tool shelf) change type to "Greater Than" (while leaving "Number of Vertices" on 4, of course). It will select all ngons. ;)

      • cool :) thx have no idea. there are still  things still hidden to me in blender .I try to remember that :)

  10. Alex Delderfield (AD-Edge) on

    Hmm, I was under the impression the 2.64 release would have a bunch of much anticipated BGE updates as well, a bunch of stuff has been committed to trunk recently (to start with - Harmony branch), yet no mention at all here? 

  11. Bsurfaces is an amazing addon  , proper retopology and new mesh tools added with this one making modeling alot easier. It also shows how far one may go without even touching C source code. Getting this into trunk is absolutely necessary and I cant thank enough the original author for making this GPL. So far for me the biggest and most important feature addition to blender 2.6. 

  12. Yay!! Blender Zspheres, I mean Blender skin modifier is amazing. Creating a base mesh for sculpting can't be any easier.

    Blender sculpting has come a long way quickly. I just wish the smooth brush wasn't super duper ultra slow when used with multi resolution at high poly counts. It is avoidable by not using multi-resolution but that is a compromise.

    Never the less, I am super grateful for everybody's efforts.

    I wish I could time travel to a future with hair and sss in Cycles.

  13. Huzzah for the skin modifier!!! Everything else is great but this really caught me off guard, didn't know Nicholas was still working on it! I cannot wait to get my hands on it.

  14. Perhaps it is not the good post to ask this but anyway, is it possible to have a message like : " Do you realy want to quit Blender yes/no " when you quit Blender.   ;)

  15. I really2 love blender with its open developement, so that we know what's going on. You know, there is one simple blender default behavior that I found less swift. The default left click assign to changing the 3d cursor place, where I use it less comparing to selecting object / vertex, or changing view and rotating view. I use a lot of translating 3d view which is using 2 button (Shift+MMB).

    I know that changing the default shortcut is a lot to ask, because changing the essential behavior of a program could consume time to change the user habit, but as we change the habit, blender could become a much more swift application

    • Actually, I switched from Lightwave many years ago and I can honestly say, that now I see Blender's RMB selection (instead of LMB, like in almost all other apps) extremely useful; namely if you're using graphic tablet as I do. Of course, it was very unaccustomed feeling from first moment, but I got used to it quickly. When you use tablet pen it is much better to make selections using pen button than with tip tap, because you don't need to touch tablet surface so you never make unwanted move with any element. ;)

      But if you want to use LMB for selection, there is an option for you in preferences: "User Preferences", tab "Input", switch "Select With" (Right/Left).

  16. I've been experimeting with the cloth modifier for a little bit. Actually, I was trying to replicate the cloth mesh structure from the 3ds max (making my blender cloth all triangles) via bmesh,knife and subdivide. It works much much better than all quads cloth structure. Now, it would be great if somehow we can model the cloth as quads  but than during the simulation convert the mesh into triangles?

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