Hi all,
Whoops! With all the excitement of the 2.76 release, I forgot to post this week's Developer Meeting Notes!
Here are the notes of today's meeting in irc.freenode.net #blendercoders.
Ton writes:
1) The 2.76 release
- After a couple of "release ahoys", we now have a final official 2.76 binary available!
- Mirrors have been syncing now, after this e-mail the release will be announced officially.
- Julian Eisel made a great list of "missing features" that didn't end up in logs.
2) Planning for the upcoming months
- Meeting confirms to stick to BCon1 (everything is open) until early December. This to have time and energy to discuss 2.8 proposals and find out how to make a bigger leap.
- Within two weeks a lot of people will be on the Blender Conference. Expect 2.8 planning to be
one of the main topics.- If conference visitors want a quiet meeting room for discussions with small groups (8-12) let me know!
- Campbell Barton proposes: Python will get version bump to 3.50.
- Mike Erwin, works with AMD on getting OpenSubdiv less bottlenecked at CPU and use GPU better. He will write up a proposal in wiki, also to help making Blender perform reliable for benchmarks.
Result might require a release update. We'll check this later.- A short discussion on "Unified physics" revealed difference in viewpoints. We can keep using
different libraries for physics, but attempt to unify the APIs and data structures that connect it.
The user experience and tools then is unified. For example, a node system could achieve that.- Responsibilities: a free period of discussion and reviewing ideas should not lead to insecurity.
It keeps being important to (re)confirm team roles and empower individuals to work on things.
This should be much more clear before December.Laters,
-Ton-
8 Comments
I know is going to sound very tedious but you have to do something about multi tile UDIM uvs for displacement maps and the rest of the process texturing and normal maps in a more easy way because is not something fancy is very necessary pro production and render times also for cache assimilation.
Other thing vector displacement came in a good form now I work with blender at the industry in SF California and also I work with some ILM people in a pipeline for preproduction and the always say UDIM please thats one of the most important goals for production good way.
I agreem Mario.
I myself appreciate the great development effort from these guys. These guys are pretty awesome.
Though, I do hope that, as Blender grows and begins to adopt some of the newer standards (like OpenSubdiv), they'll also improve on taking a more industry-focused approach to development priority overall.
I hate to sound ungrateful or anything, because I'm not and I totally appreciate what Blender is and it'll be a darker world without its presence. I think we all feel that way.
But as someone making a living in the 3D industry, I also have to be practical and admit where Blender falls short. I hate to admit that I've had to acquire other software just to get along with my freelancing work, and even my own game development.
I hope we start seeing the needs of those of us in industry a little ahead of features more attuned to the simpler needs of the hobbyist community. Sometimes I feel like our industrial needs get placed as second to community-priority developments.
Not to undervalue anyone here. I appreciate both industry and community. I just hope we don't have to wait another year for stuff other folks have had for several years now, like vector displacement maps, UDIM and full FBX support.
WIth that said, with such limited resources and few developers, I do also know that it's much easier said than done. Though, I say all this regardless, in case Blender sees another crowdfunded effort in the near future (which seems to be evident now). I hope they keep this in mind in their next great opportunity for focused, funded development.
Correction: "I agree, Mario."
Agreem. :P
Totally agree with Mario :)
As much as I love the new version I sadly have to roll back to the previous one until the 'Replace Spaces with Underscores' "Feature" has an option to disable it. It's messing up the file naming structure which the company I work for uses, I have to manually rename everything, it's a nightmare!
Other than that, the latest version is great, keep up the good work devs.
Yes, an option to disable this would be nice! I've had this issue, too.
As much as I understand your concern (and perhaps I'll find myself on this case just for the sake of speaking about it!)... my advice is NEVER use namespaces for any "programming sensible" thing.
I understand that but not all Blender work requires programming like file naming conventions and there are times when there are existing file naming conventions in place where spaces are desired, such as the company where I work, which is a furniture manufacturer, with a lots of employees doing many non-3D art related things, I'm just the in house 3D artist and I have to be able to work in with all their existing conventions.
The "spaces replaced with underscores" thing applies to everything, even folder names. It's just a pain that every time I save an image, blender file or create a folder, if I want or need to put a space in the name, I have to go back through a file browser external to Blender to rename it. It's just adding an unnecessary step to something I already have to do 50 times a day.
Surely spaces aren't that evil that we need Blender to force users to keep them out of file and folder names? Surely this is a feature which could be optional at the very least? A little tickbox maybe in the settings window to just turn it off if we don't want it?