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Developer Meeting Notes, June 17, 2012

34

Blender 2.64 is creeping closer, and there are updates on many interesting Blender projects.

Ton Roosendaal writes:

Hi all,

Here are the notes from today's developer meeting in irc.freenode.net #blendercoders

1) Blender 2.64 release

  • The "BCon 3" (stabilize, bug fix) period has been extended to at least july 1st.
  • Bug tracker went slightly down to 293 (from 300). A lot of reports come in each day still!
  • Suggestions: involve GSoC students with bugs too, if in their area of work. People can also help with triaging (just assign reports to someone). We can also limit the support we give... the bug tracker is really only meant for people to provide clear cases a developer can redo.
  • Cycles: Brecht van Lommel works on optimizations (needed for Mango too), Ton will ask him to write about it on the blog.
  • Tiles (compositor): Jeroen Bakker has important fixes/speedup ready too, will commit soon.

2) Other projects

  • Jeroen Bakker went to the AMD Developer Conference, they're very positive and aim at getting cycles to run. No hard evidence or promises made though.
  • Nicholas Bishop has a Mesh Undo proposal that needs feedback:
  • Sergey Sharybin will work on the color pipeline for Mango, in a branch. We will use OpenColorIO for good transforms of linear float buffers (for drawing in UI), and ensure color input (swatches) map this inversed correctly. Also the confused alpha (premul/straight) pipeline will get tackled.
  • Ton Roosendaal mentions there's a new blender.org header in progress ((Images are temporary, it'll be easy to make new slideshows regularly).

  • Ton also invites people to think of post 2.6 projects. A special focus for 2.7x and 2.8x? Suggestion: in all of 2013, BF focus on Blender itself (no open movies!).

3) Google Summer of Code

  • Progress video by Antonis Ryakiotakis

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_eL_W5sorc&feature=plcp

  • Ton mentions that still not every student is reporting (or reporting on a satisfying level). Mentors will be in contact with the students to get them up to speed, midterm is in 4 weeks!

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.

34 Comments

  1. "Jeroen Bakker went to the AMD Developer Conference, they’re very
    positive and aim at getting cycles to run. No hard evidence or promises
    made though."

    yeah, i like to hear that, still hanging with the loading compiler thinggy, which comsumes up all my memory...
    and i would love to use my 6790 for rendering purposes too, not only for gaming ^^

  2. Andrew Curry on

    Hey team,

    You never cease to amaze me with all of the fantastic additions to Blender! Great news about the compositor, can't wait to see that rocking and rolling soon. I'll keep my fingers crossed about AMD and Cycles; I've got 2x ATI 5850s in my system and am itching to get Cycles running with a full feature set.

    Andy Curry
    Director
    The Journeyman Project Tribute
    http://andyjourneyman.blogspot.com

  3. I don't normally say this, but Bratwurst looks delicious! Antonis Ryakiotakis has my thanks for this great work.

      • chromemonkey on

        Dynamic Adaptive Tessellation! For either BGE or the main Blender program proper. [ No, I don't want fries with that. Why does everyone keep asking me that? ;o) ]

    • That's what I had in mind.
      An other year just to develop a game (instead a Open Movie) that can be part of the Blender Foundation walls.

      The actual blender players has licence problems, right?

      Yo Frankie was a great proyect to create the bases of the BGE that we have now, was the first game that has the support of the Fundation (and the advances in the engine were huge, with this only game), imagine what will happend to the Game Engine layout with other proyect that promote its development.

      Greetings

      • PD: I really will like something like the "Smooth Stroke" that is in the sculpt section, in the texture paint.

        Because this give us best control in our brush strokes (to make for example a detail tatoo or a logo directly in texture paint) :)

    • Agreed! Agreed! Agreed! I saw this functionality for the first time in Max long time ago and I was amazed by its usability. I always missed this in my editors. This can be a huge time saver in certain situations! I can't wait to see it in trunk! THANKS ANTONIS! Marvelous work you presented!

  4. Anarchymedes on

    With regards to Blender 2.7x or 2.8x, how about this:
    1. Integration with Makehuman and some such, for quick character creation
    2. Crowd simulation, particle effects, etc. - take a look at UDK for inspiration
    3. More base meshes, like bolts and nuts: Add Car, for example, or Add Flyer, or some such.
    All of the above is to improve the current situation whereby planning and making a short film, or even a music video is a bit like starting to build a house from manufacturing your own bricks and mixing your own mortar (instead of using pre-cast blocks).

    Also, how about the MoCap equivalent for facial expressions? I know from a few job adds by Autodesk in Singapore that Maya - the Arch Enemy - is going to have it, if it does not already.

    And finally, there are heaps of things to be improved when it comes to physics: collisions, cloth, hair, fluids (show me a realistic CG lava fountain!!!), smoke/flame, and so on.

    I'd say that should be enough until Blender 2.99a release (and then the 3.0 release will have to be a holographic virtual reality suite, allowing the virtual actors to play opposite real ones :-) )

    • 1.I agree with integrating Makehuman into blender, that would be very useful for rendering and for the game development
      3. More base meshes do not make sence, maybe only if there would be ONE special button in "add object" menu [SPACEBAR].

      I would like to have a whole 2.7 or 2.8 series as a Game Engine Series but I doubt it will happen :(

  5. 2.7x needs render layer overrides for every material option. Until Blender has decent render layer settings, it won't be up to par for cg integration and compositing.

  6. (Sorry for my bad english. Imagine that im talking in a polite way)How about getting more integration with other softwares and formats?
    I work in a animation company and we want to composite in blender some animations that we already made in maya (and rendered with mental ray) but:
    * Blender doest read all the exr formats (not the ones that have layers in it).
    * It would be cool to have a vector blur node that can interpret all the vector blur information from other softwares.
    * And an automatic unpremull for the premultiplied images :D

    I know that when a persons says to integrate blender in a pipeline with maya the people start saying: "why not to animate in blender and composite in blender?" (I would love that to happend but..) Well, the market does not always work as easy as that. And I think the softwares that are on the market, are beacuse they have two things:
    1. A new paradigm in 3d production (blender have its own: All kinds of digital production tools all in one. Modo and zbrush had their own paradigm at the time that were launched)
    2. Compatibility, just to put in on a worflow. (I think that blender will be a option for the industry if they offer a full integration with other softwares on a pipeline. And it will be a good choice because in case of emergency (in case something in other software doest work quite well) blender (for sure) have an alternative tool to get rid of the problem (for that moment and in that specific and hipotetic case) and the full production compatibility would be the key to choose blender in that particular moment (and that kind of things will be a chance for the software :D).

    Note: Vray was used in Tron legacy instead of other render engines because they start offering full technical support for the company that made the movie (and because of their price and growing capabilities). Maybe (I dont know how mad is this idea) blender can offer that full support just to demostrate that blender in a pipeline can get the job done.

    -And again: Sorry for my bad english-
    Thanks :D

  7. this texture painting stuff made me faint. I woke up watched it again. Fainted again.

    Antonis Ryakiotakis deserves a parade. I love this program so much. Its the most rapidly advancing program that I've ever seen. I compare your feature-sheet awesomeness to the itterations of zbrush R2 and R3 and when it comes to advancement. Nothing even comes close.

    Blender projects are the best because that means we get nothing but improvements all throughout plus an epic film at the end.

  8. One of the points mentioned was :

    "Ton also invites people to think of post 2.6 projects. A special focus for 2.7x and 2.8x? Suggestion: in all of 2013, BF focus on Blender itself (no open movies!)."

    Question is, were to post ideas? Can you guys find out?

    Would be intresting to create a seperate post on this and have one area for comment from users.. Or even a Poll.

    If a Poll, I would ask for "bug fixes, code optimization/documentation" as one option. A release like that would really help make Blender more stable. Adding features is nice, but be even better to not watch tutorials where the first comment is. "Save and save often because blender crashes often"

    Beyond that, as strange as it sounds, posts like this make me feel that I actaully have input and am trully part of the community. Well done guys, and keep it up.

    • chromemonkey on

      ( [quote] "where to post ideas?" [quote] )

      BlenderStorm is one possible place. I'm not sure if it's the only or even the best place, but it is *a* place for both feature suggestions and proposals for how to implement them.
      (I made two suggestions on BlenderStorm over the weekend, and that's my limit for now.)

      • The main question about where to post ideas is to find out where Ton is going to check out the ideas.

        I'm just hopeful to see a full point release with nothing more than just fixes and optimizations. A full month or two that concentrates on nothing but bug fixes and tweaks would do wonders for Blender at this point. And hopefully result in better documentation for newer users.

        Still BlenderStorm.. haven't been there in a while, time to check it out again.

        • There's no official feedback cycle scheduled yet. The dynamics of having people share ideas everywhere (here, blenderstorm, blender mailing lists, blenderartists, etc) is really valuable. Don't underestimate how well things are being read.

  9. Kirill Poltavets on

    an Idea for 2.7:
    Create a nice casual game (in spirit of Samorost and other diamonds) using Blender, GIMP and other Open Source programs.
    pluses for this (IMHO):
    - our big community, everybody will help by wish (casual quests usually need a lot of props!) - making props and some background characters. I know how much time takes creating of props if you're a small studio (or you're dealing with outsource firms and that can be not easy)
    - we have enough experienced people who can make a decent script for such game
    - Blender is almost ready for threads like this. Just need to work on BGE (to fit it for quests) and probably some work to add tools for painting or linking with GIMP or MyPaint (to boost the workflow)
    - the game can be (probably) made for Android and (maybe) for iOS. So Blender Institute will earn some good money in a case this game will become a "blockbuster"

    minuses (IMHO as well):
    - it's almost an non-plowed field for most of Blender Community people (well, I have some experience ;) with creating puzzles and eye-spy games)
    - any game needs testing... if it will be not .exe game made completely with Blender... Android and iOS have some issues, some own problems (I'm not good with this)
    - if it will be supposed to create a commercial game (to earn money for development) then this thread surely need a good marketing research. The casual gaming market is big now... so it can be tricky. I can only monitor products and it takes a lot of time (every decent game must be played to understand why people loves or hates it).

  10. We have a wonderful fluid particle system that we are not taking advantage of. SPH Fluid particles are so flexible and stable, but they still need a particle skin, or a better/faster metaball system that works with BI and Cycles.

    Fluid particles + node particles + particle skin + ocean sim + dynamic paint could be the perfect toolset for faking all kind of liquid interactions, from splashes, to massive tsunamis and so on.

  11. Arnaud Couturier on

    Suggestions to Ton:

    - why not make the development fund more prominent on the home page of Blender's website ? Not aggressive, but visible, not buried in some obscure page.

    - And why not make it more "fun", for example with a "donation meter" like during the Durian project. Or showing a ladder of regular donors, with a little icon or avatar to make them proud that they officially support Blender, and the world can see it.

  12. For the image editing, the one thing I have really wanted for many moons is the ability to seamlessly wrap painting the way ZBrush does when you hit the ~ key to move the whole texture and automatically wrap it. For instance the image gets dragged down while holding the ~ key and it wraps over to the top. This allows them to create seamless tiling textures very easily.

  13. One more idea for 2.7, 2.8, ...:
    It would be amazing to develop the simulation abilities in blender further: For example, to combine the obstacle abilities of the fluid simulator with the wave modifier and maybe add support for floating objects. Also I think hair dynamics need some attention to make them usable for characters (collision with the character mesh doesn't work now AFAIK).

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