A LONG 2.65 update today, an exciting read!
Ton Roosendaal writes:
Hi all,
Here are the notes from the 1500 UTC meeting in irc.freenode.net #blendercoders.
(Note, winter time in Netherlands, meetings are one our later. :)1) Blender 2.65 targets and progress
- Project planning.
- The bug hunt goes fabulous! Current total is 107 now. Down from 211 reports 10 days ago!
- Sergey Sharybin: Build environment for Linux versions will upgrade, but it'll work for distros newer or equal to ubuntu 10.04
- Campbell Barton proposes to upgrade Python to 3.3 for this release. He will need help from MSVC 2008 developer, and for OSX.
- Bastien Montagne has a patch available for Dynamic Sketch.
- Campbell notes that people who want their scripts to be included in our release Add-ons, should contact the bf-python list. The candidates are here.
- Brecht van Lommel will work on the OSL script node for Cycles this week.
- Thomas Dinges playing with OSL in Cycles:
- Sergey Sharybin will be mostly offline for a week, but he has time to do code reviews for Nicholas Bishop's Dynamic Topo sculpting.
- Sergej Reich should have his Bullet GSoC project ready for review in a few days. There are some changes he wants to do still, but he postponed it because it will cause compatibility errors with old .blends saved with this branch.
- Sergej can really use help with docs and a nice release log for users. Help!
- Initial review of Freestyle branch shows that's it not ready in two weeks (deadline for release targets to get added in trunk). Bastien Montagne is interested to check on helping Tamito, we could make sure it's OK for 2.66.
- Sergey works on proper thread ownership referencing of images in Blender, to solve long outstanding issues (crashes) with previews especially.
- Daniel Genrich reports that the Smoke sim GSoC branch now is 955 in trunk. Rest follows soon. Doc.
- Lukas Toenne will complete Python Nodes next week. Build instructions.
- Campbell will finish BMesh Python API & docs for the BMesh operators.
- Splash: proposal is to ask the winners of 2012 Suzanne to select a splash. This time they will be advised to not do it via contest, but by selecting an artist based on his/her public gallery.
2) Other projects - post 2.65
A discussion started about ways to use Python for complete different UIs in Blender (like a modeler for 3d printer or so). It's a current topic to further investigate.
-Ton-
17 Comments
I was hoping that they would start concentrating on the blender BGE :(. A lot of people could really use it.
Smoke sim looks cool though.
+1 I'm just hanging out to see more of how Hive came together as well as the BGE Android port.
I heard about OSL the first time in Blender Podcast 20, it already sounded quite interesting. So many interesting feature to play with and so little time....
Also, congratulation on the bug count!
Is Bullet GSoC project only for integrating phisics ? or maybe it's also for better cloth ?
That would be great.
Get That Freestyle in there
Every time a new release comes out it's "maybe Freestyle?"
"Nope, no freestyle yet."
"A discussion started about ways to use Python for complete different UIs in Blender (like a modeler for 3d printer or so). It’s a current topic to further investigate."
I think this should absolutely be done, because there are many things, that could be much easier in a little bit different user interface. And other projects could be made using possibilities, that blender already has. For example apparel and pattern making software wich could benefit from cloth sim that is already in Blender.. or maybe a better interface for compositing things..
Freestyle.. ahh. I have played with it and it is ok for static images, but animation just has too many errors and glitches in lines. I started using it for one commersial project, but just wasn't able to render it out in good quality.. So I had to export everything to Maya and use it's paint system.. And I must say.. there was no glitches there..
Great that the bugcount is down to 107. Thats really good work. Thanks a lot !
it get's more exciting everyday!
congrats to all the developers.. good job on the low bug count:)
Love that the bug count is being addressed.
Better than new features!
Thanks a Ton.
(No play on words intended)
[ It was intended... you captialized it! ;o) ]
Whither NURBana! :) Now that the mesh system has been updated (which should soon bring the ability to code better tools more quickly), it would be great to have some features such as booleans-over-nurbs to easly create silky-smooth geometric cross-sections of all kinds, using one nurb object to trim another. Meta-blobs only get me so far.
I second the vote for nurbana integration. If I'm not terribly mistaken this project was more or less finished but put on hold waiting for 2.5 to complete. Even a simple but complete nurbs implementation would be a huge step forwards. The current (non-scriptable) nurbs solution is preatty much a dead end since it impossible to extend it with scripts.
I third the motion for NURBana. Blender's spline modelling tools are currently the main reason I'm still using max!
Congratulations with low bug count, guys! :)
Current plans sounds good! Personally I'm glad to hear about Bullet soon implementation although I can't fully understand about this care for those people who made some projects in the branch (many branches "suffer" from that incompatibility, right?). Many postponed cool features becomes a kind of... stone monuments to Blender's powerful future. I'm just concerned.
I really hope for sooner import/export .OBJ complete implementation.
Blender suffers from not reading n-gons while importing objs. It's very important for fast CAM/CAD object installations. Currently Blender is one of the best (fastest b'coz of Cycles!) programs for making some serious product visualizations. So this IO OBJ part will be a real gift for all people working with that viz. stuff. :)
A different tangent, literally just throwing this out there. Having no knowledge of what it takes to do this, can someone give me an idea (or at least give me a link to where people discuss such things), how much the anti-aliasing module for the blender scanline renderer would have to be re-written to add an extra level... is it trivial or does each level of AA require an entirely different formula? And does the formula change depending on whether the number of samples is an even power of two?
(I forgot to check the "email followup comments" box, so I'll add something here.)
I'm also wondering if maybe antialiasing and blur filters are the wrong way to go. When you look at the ground from several miles up, or look at the moon from the earth, you don't see something blurry. The edges of what you do see are sharp; it is simply that the features become "indistinct" to the viewer. It has something to do with what in optics is called the "circle of least confusion"... perhaps that's nothing more than render-time tesellation/de-tesellation though.
My preceding pair of questions have been overtaken by events it would appear. Cycles is my answer. All smart Blender users learn Cycles. I did not learn Cycles. I are none too smart. I will be smarter now. :)