Developer Meeting Notes, March 24, 2013
A first peek at Cycles subsurface scattering shading!
Here’s notes from today’s meeting in irc.freenode.net #blendercoders
1) Blender 2.67 planning
- Brecht van Lommel has first SSS code working. Image with coder art:
- Ton Roosendaal: still no time for Pie menus… will try still!
- Sergej Reich: started with constraint visualization, but nothing ready yet. Might still make it in release.
- Sergey Sharybin collected updates for Motion Tracker here.
- Freestyle: more reviews were done, and all handled by Tamito Kajiyama. Should be feasible for final merger this week! Tomorrow we’ll do final checks.
- Campbell Barton reports on three projects:
- 3D Print Toolbox add-on is ready for general use and has been moved out of testing.
- Knife project tool added which is useful for insetting text/logos into models.
- Ruler/Protractor for measuring angles and lengths in the scene.
2) Other projects
- No news about git project, but Campbell and Sergey did tests already. We should also ask advice from FusionForge team.
- Martin Felke updated work on rigid body fracture modifier.
- Patch tracker urgently needs cleanup, there’s 7 year old open issues even!
The SSS looks great! I can’t wait to experiment with it!
SSS looking good. Can’t wait to see it in 3 layer skin.
Here’s hoping we get actual blend modes on the “Mix Shader” node….three-layer skin would be kind of awkward without “Screen” or at least a factor value on the “Add” node…..
And the SSS looks great!
Hallelujah!!! Hallelujah!!! Hallelujah !!! Halleluuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuujaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!!!
FINALLY!! Cycles SSS!! uuuuuuuhhhhhiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii…….
Does this means that volume render is near? Hope so..
Thank you Brecht and all other devs!
Holy Smokes batman, that looks really really great!
That SSS demo looks awesome! Can’t wait to play with it.
Great new stuff!
Soon we’ll have all the skin demos all over again!
And soon after, I expect some entire remakes of Sintel in Cycles :D
Ha! An entire movie? On the subject of big renders, does anyone know if nVidia Tesla cards are particularly good (or bad) for Cycles rendering, or are they just another ludicrously overpriced ‘professional solution’ like Quadros? The benchmarks at http://www.randomcontrol.com/arionbench seem to show that 2 x TITAN’s are often far better than a whole box full of Quadros and Teslas, and at a fraction of the price…
You may want to take a lOOk at this:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0As2oZAgjSqDCdElkM3l6VTdRQjhTRWhpVS1hZmV3OGc#gid=0
From my understanding the main limiting factor is the memory on the video card. I also believe I read something that said each card’s memory has to have the scene loaded. As for rendering speed, more cuda based cores, the faster the rendering.
Titan 2688 cores each / 6gb (standard config)
690 3072 cores (1536 per gpu) / 4gb (standard config) (2gb per gpu)
Tesla k20x 2688 cores each / 6gb
Tesla k10 3072 cores (1536 per gpu) / 8gb (4gb per gpu)
So while the 690 and tesla k10 have more cores they are limited to scenes of 2 and 4 gb since each gpu has it’s own memory and needs the entire scene for rendering.
A titan, or multiple titans would be relatively inexpensive and other than the speed up you may see from larger memory bandwidth, but you’ll make up for it with more gpus (if multiple cuda gpu rendering is possible in blender)
One more thing, we want a build!!!!! please ;P
WHOOP WHOOP :D
Great news!
@Bart: There’s typo in the news. SSS stands for subsurface scattering (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsurface_scattering), not sub surface shattering ;-)
Ah thanks :)
I’m looking forward to the pie Menu coming from the Maya animation world. I found it very useful being able to find just what you are looking for in a very short time.
good stuff . i really find it hard to believe that blender can get much better.but e very time there it is new useful upgrades and addons F’n amazing work .
SSS…coming along and taking us just one more great step closer to a more complete Cycles!
“…rigid body fracture modifier…”
Why does that seriously excite me?
Great job, guys! I truly thank you for your work! You guys seriously move some code!
SSSoon!!!! Can’t wait for this and Cycles Hair for GPU!
Bidir rendering will be awesome too!
Knife-project is cool! It will be even cooler if possible to introduce cutting object’s topology there. I know it’s more like Boolean…
Rigid body fracture modifier – sounds like an amazing feature! :)
Guys, do you plan to add a simple Merge Verts modifier? Just a part of the code from Mirror. It’s like “Remove Doubles” but dynamically. I need this feature to make some effects like breaking trough metal cuts and etc. It’s really necessary because ripped off faces renders with “seams” if there is a “Smooth” shading.
An option to display mirrored meshes as if the center edgeloop (at the axis boundary of the mirror modifier) were removed would also be an interesting thing to include. There are times when I have to apply the modifier and remove the center loop because it is unwanted geometry in my final mesh, which takes away a little bit from the non-destructive edit workflow.
Does anyone know if the algorithm for Softimage’s GATOR is documented anywhere? Blender recently got a weight transfer tool, and I’ve been thinking about scripting one that used a similar tactic.
Thanks for your dev,I know you work very hard .
Thx to developers :D
I undestand that SSS recieves so much attention but, believe me, knife projection is simply A-W-E-S-O-M-E. WOW.
+1 for Merge Verts modifier or the like. I have to merge loads of verts-edges manually every day.
Fantastic job, people.