This week's update from the Blender Developers!
Ton Roosendaal writes:
Hi all,
Here's the notes from today's meeting in irc.freenode.net #blendercoders:
1) Work on the next release
- Sergey Sharybin will add his holiday coding work on Plane Tracking in trunk this week:
Coder video:
Artist video:
- Bastien Montagne works on improvements in uiLists; adds resizing of lists by dragging, and filtering/reordering options.
- Brecht van Lommel will work on SSS, adding the improved sampling (solid angle paper from Siggraph for bssrdf sampling). Ubershader work might not be feasible for this release though.
- Next week the official 2.69 targets will be defined.
- Bug tracker is growing... 170 open issues.
2) Other projects
- Ton Roosendaal wrote an explanation of our Module Team organization.
- The Module owner list now has an extra column for user-owners.
- Meeting considers proposal for add-ons linking to commercial services approved.
- Read Ton's Siggraph report here.
3) Google Summer of Code
- GSoC still runs for 6 weeks. When students get tangible results to report, they can get code.blender.org account to post.
- Daniel Stokes proposes to add his Level of Detail work to the 2.69 release (doc).
That's it, thanks!
-Ton-
16 Comments
I'm glad that the "pie menu" is going in soon. It's very useful for the individuals like myself that has trouble remembering all of the shortcut keys. I'm also glad that the uberShader is going in sometime in the future. The uberShader is very useful tool along with the many toolboxes that Blender is built on. Thanks!!
Is it me? or what? but I really don't like "pie menus", it's a very invasive "pie" that covers a lot of the already crowded UI, in my opinion, not excited about it, honestly. With all due respect to the creator but if it was by me this pie menu should stay away from blender. :)
I am remembering the pie menu in Maya. I really haven't seen the one in blender. I am hoping that they are the same. I could be in for a total surprise!!
Will they individual pie menu?
Apple pie
Cherry pie
Right?
Blender's projects for next year's Google Summer of Code for next year should be divided up into various flavors of "pie branches" at any rate!
The pie menus seem interesting, (I tried them) but I don't know if I can get used to them.. As long as enabling them is optional :)
Ton's Siggraph report mentioned this:
"Apple visited our booth the day after to re-establish a strong connection with Blender development. They will do anything needed to get OpenCL working for Cycles on their new MacPro, including direct connection with developers for bug fixing and seeding hardware."
I'm not an Apple user, but I'm very glad to hear there's some positive push towards getting OpenCL working. Imagine all those potential new Blender users with AMD/ATi cards who currently find Cycles is simply 'dead'? Historically, Blender was able to work on almost any old hardware, but currently one of its most important features is crippled for a very large proportion of (potential) users.
Blender compatibility is vital to my next computer purchase, and compatibility with the new Mac Pro has been a major question for me.
I prefer Apple for the OS, relative stability, security and reliability, despite the limited hardware selection. Right now there's only one real viable Apple option for me, and even then, that could change if Apple switches the iMac GPUs back to Radeon before Cycles manages to work with AMD OpenCL.
I also prefer OS X over other operating systems. This Apple related news is really great. New Mac Pro's compatibility with Cycles is crucial for me.
only remains Automatic detection of feature points, very good job
pie menu's are a waste of time and space . why click twice or even three time's when you only need to do it once .
Pie menus can be implemented as a single click-and-drag operation, I thought. If I thought wrong, so be it.
http://www.blender.org/blenderorg/blender-foundation/press/siggraph-2013/
OpenCL is heavily being pushed now by Khronos, AMD, Intel and Apple. NVidia still prefers to dominate with CUDA, it's unsure how much they keep supporting OpenCL though.
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This approach by Nvidia is going to cost them dearly.
May I make a suggestion for 2.69?
Brush sizes are resized with "F".
Proportional editing influence is resized with "PgUp" and "PgDown".
Paint select's brush size is resized with "+" and "-".
I prefer the first method ... but even so it's not that important. I just wish they were the same.
I may not be able to use some of these features. I'm still working on the basics. I'm also might not find pie menus to my liking.
It would still be fun to use them when the time comes.
I think pie menus would be a welcome UI feature, especially for those who are new to blender. Perhaps as others suggested, an off/on switch would be nice for more advanced users. I think customization is king!