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Developer Meeting Notes: April 20, 2014

19

blender_logo_shinyEven during Easter, the developer meetings continue :)

Ton Roosendaal writes:

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

1) Blender 2.71 targets

  • The project list is still valid.
  • Tamito Kajiyama has a patch ready, but needs UI help (review). He will connect with the blender-npr list too for it.
  • Antonis Ryakiotakis will have his paint tool project ready for review this week:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5jkcSIvGis

2) Other projects

  • Tomorrow the GSoC applicants will get news from Google!
  • Our OpenCL developers are sort of giving up on it... Ton Roosendaal proposes the following strategy now: To offer AMD, Apple, Intel etc support to get Blender and Luxrender installed and tested well. And tell them they can come back to us when it works.

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.

19 Comments

  1. wow! really loved the new paint tools!!, i wonder if the new "curve" paint mode can work together with the tracking system, because if we can assign a curve point to a track point, we may have the hability to make something similar to Disney´s Paperman shortfilm, i would be amase if this can be made

  2. Mitch McCollum on

    I cant wait till we have real layers in the texture editor like photoshop, because right now I just dont feel its doing it for me..

    • Brian Lockett on

      Yeah, a layers system with opacity control, blend modes and layer merging options (for both Texture Paint and Sculpt Modes) would be nice, but I guess they'll come in time. One step at a time, I suppose.

      • Brian Lockett on

        Well, after checking out the latest Texture Paint build from Graphicall, I should say, they are in development, at least with Texture Paint Mode for now. Just waiting for it to arrive into trunk. Thanks again for all you do, Psy-Fi! :)

  3. "To offer AMD, Apple, Intel etc support to get Blender and Luxrender installed and tested well. And tell them they can come back to us when it works."

    Unless I misunderstood something, it sounds like the Blender Foundation is asking the Big Guys to include Blender in their OpenCL test pipeline and then report back when, and if OpenCL works with Blender and Luxrender.
    Is that correct?
    Because if it is, and, just to play the Devil's advocate here, if I were one of those big corporations' representatives, I'd ask, what's my company going to get out of this? Besides the reputation of a software freedom fighter, of course--which isn't much in these crisis-filled, financially-constrained times (Apple?! Free and Open Source?! The Hell will freeze over first).
    So, continuing to speak as the Devil's advocate Big Corporation representative, I would probably agree to consider such an offer, if--and only if!--the resulting OpenCL support is *sold* separately, as a *paid add-on*, and my company gets its share. Or at least if the versions of Blender and Luxrender featuring OpenCL scream from every splash screen, "Powered By [the product name], Copyright [the company name]".
    And if the OpenCL developers are truly giving up, here is an alternative suggested task for them: how about, for example, an ability to pause/resume a Cycles render? That way, if I really wanted a super-high quality render, I could make, say, 8 hours a day (overnight?) for 5 days, instead of keeping my laptop running for 40 hours on end (something it probably won't survive).

    • the Blender users will and are currently moving to the competition and will just ignore AMD further and further due to their inability to make working hard and software.

      AMD just has to have an interest in gaining a bit of market shares from Nvidea.
      or do those shareholders don´t want more money?

      since nearly 5 years or even more almost everyone in the 3D field who also has money, runs to a more competent competition aka Nvidea because their cards work for GPU renderings, GPU accelerated sculpting and so on.
      Blender devs are kind enough in offering AMD to get an easy sales increase in GPUs sold to 3D Artists.
      there are far more hobbyists out there than paid artists...
      and Blender already has CPU and GPU rendering with Intel cpus,amd cpus and bang the competition in GPUs = Nvidea.

      If AMD gets their OpenCL driver into a workable state for OpenCL capable tools for example Blenders Cycles, many people can and will easily be able to get a sense if AMD cards are again good enough.
      For now AMD lost its credibility and has no shares no sales on cards for Artists.
      so many renderers like vray, thea, octane and of course cycles rely and work already perfectly with Cuda.

      AMD needs someone holding the door open in that field who already can give them access to many buyers who would buy budget-ware like they AMD offer - currently that is Blender with masses of hobbyists users who all need graphic cards.
      the marketing devision of AMD might be sleeping but even I doubt, that they would be demanding money for something which the competition is offering for only the price of the bought hardware...

    • Still don't understand how design choices were made when cycles gpu core was developed. Other applications can use OpenCL perfectly, like LuxRender, Darktable, Photoshop CS6, FinalCut Pro and so on. Ok, maybe there is some roadblock, but hey, Cycles is not final at all, so I don't think it's impossible to work around and use CUDA and OpenCL equally well.

  4. FluxCapacitance on

    Can't wait for the day paint tool quality reaches Krita's current level. Blender's default brush set, though functional, still works more like a blur-paint tool. Love the hard work put in to usability on layers. Huge improvement.

      • Craig Richardson on

        "Krita style texture painting inside blender would be quite something"

        Yes you are quite correct, however not completely, it would not be quite something, you would have singlehandedly handed even the likes of Zbrush back to them and laughed at them because Krita is even better than the likes of zbrush at texture painting.

        But come on just Krita, what about Artrage 4, that awesome piece of software comes with natural media brushes that rival even the likes of Painter 13 lol.

        The lovely piece of information that makes this really sweat is that these software programmes are Open source, however I am not quite sure if their licences are compatible with blenders but come on how awesome would it be if they were merged into blender as a sort of addon lol

        Yes I know I am dreaming lol but if the developers wanted to integrate their software into blender, all of the systems are in place to allow that to happen.

        • Uhm, License is not the problem. Krita being written in c++ with qt, and Blender written in a much older variation of c/c++ is.
          Or, you know, that they are completely different programs with completely different architectures.

          Krita and Blender are of course mindful of each others existence, but Krita is not something you can just add-on.

  5. Craig Richardson on

    oh by the way guys I have a slight problem and was wondering if someone could help me.
    My question is this, "Does blender support Microsoft Ink API"
    The reason is this, I am sick of using a Wacom intuose pro when digital painting and sculpting because I have to have my hand and eyes at two different places which is hard to get used to and is affecting the quality of the work I am producing due to this.
    since I cant afford the money to buy a laptop as well as Wacom 13HD i was thinking about buying something like Microsoft surface pro 2 or sony vaio Duo 13, something that would serve as a cool graphics tablet and a laptop in one, but the problem plaguing the Microsoft surface pro 2 is that it is only 10.6 inches however that is the one using Wacom and I know for a certainty that it is supported within blender, but the other one called Sony Vaio Duo 13 is N trig pen abled and requires Software to be compatible with the Microsoft Ink API.
    Thanks in advanced

  6. martin_lindelof on

    2 generations back with FERMI chipset, Nvidia was really keen on GPU Compute and CUDA. Those cards performs really well! my GTX 580s renders the BMW scene in 14-16s (got 3 of them). AMD never really jumped that compute train, OpenCL has always been lagging behind CUDA.

    And now it's almost to late, if you can't see it. These two latest generations form both camps is ALL about gaming tech, focus on Mantle and such techs.

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