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Blender developers meeting notes, Sunday 31 July 2016

11

Ton Roosendaal writes:

Here are the notes from today's 14 UTC meeting in irc.freenode.net #blendercoders.

1) Blender 2.78 release

  • Planning and overview of targets.
  • Not all targets are ready yet, we move the 'BCon3' deadline to make sure they're all in git master.
  • Hermann Vosseler's (ichtyo) 2D stablizer gets final approval for merge in trunk.
  • Review of Alembic code is still progressing, needs a couple of more days.
  • Patch for OpenHMD support (realtime vr playback in in Viewport) almost done, Vive support will be added.
  • Brendon Murphy will handle adding the new addons for release.
  • Everyone wants the GTX 1080 cards supported with Cycles, unfortunately the required CUDA 8.0 is still not official released. We can add their release candidate though. Sergey Sharybin and Brecht van Lommel check into this.
  • Accepted patches: devs check this list please, last chance to get this in 2.78.

2) Other projects, Blender 2.8

  • Mike Erwin is working on GL cleanup and upgrade in the 2.8 branch. He will send a "call for help" email once the basics are in place and others can help.
  • Ton Roosendaal reports he had a tremendous successful trip to Toronto, LA and SF last week. Full report is coming, but the short story is that Blender Institute can add 4 more full time developers on Blender, supported by AMD and Tangent Animation.

3) GSoC

  • no updates or actions reported.

Laters,

-Ton-

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.

11 Comments

  1. Cool to hear about the funding. Blender is moving in the right direction, and I think a lot more studios and development companies will be supporting it in the coming years.

    I'm assessing the program again for Unknown Worlds. So far what I've seen is promising. The learning curve has improved significantly with hotkeys in the tooltips. When I assessed it last time (2+ yrs ago) it required an internet hotkey cheat sheet, and that was a killer. If I can get referencing to work well with rigs, the animation key manipulation isn't as clunky as I remember it to be, and I see some favorable improvements previewed in the 2.8, I think Blender might be the way for our studio to go on next projects.

    The biggest test will passing along a rigged character to my animators. If their learning curve isn't too steep, and they're able to produce animation in a timely fashion, I think Blender becomes a likely tool.

    Does anyone know if it's possible to manipulate keys in the animation timeline? One feature I'd hate to do without is the ability to easily move and scale key timings in the timeline. It's like having a one line dopesheet always present, and it was probably one of the most frustrating deficiencies I experienced animating in Blender last time.

    • Colin,
      There is this script: https://bitbucket.org/ohsnapitsjoel/anim_timeline_keymover But I highly recommend using the dopesheet. Timeline is not built for animation. For your use case keep a dopesheet above the time line. Like so : http://www.pasteall.org/pic/105607 This is what I do for timing. I don't really use the timeline very much, I really only use it to make sure I am in the correct Keying Set. In this screenshot I have hidden the header. I hope these suggestions help.

      • If you haven't gotten a chance to use the workflow in maya or 3dsMax, it's actually quite nice to move keys in the timeline. It's very quick, and you don't have to dedicate any additional space for a simple function like moving keys and adjusting timing. If you use dopesheet instead of the timeline, that pretty well illustrates why the timeline should have an expanded function.

  2. "short story is that Blender Institute can add 4 more full time developers on Blender, supported by AMD and Tangent Animation."

    Thankyou very kindly AMD and Tangent Animation, 4 full time developers is an amazing, and will no doubt really help speed up development and help Blender get ready for it's bit 2.8 plans.

    Can I just give a special shoutout to AMD though, they have been seriously wonderful lately, this isn't the only thing they have helped out with, they have given lots of support to Blender. Their support is really wonderful and greatly appreciated and creates lots of goodwill in the Blender community, thankyou AMD!

  3. 4 more developers eh? Looking forward to the full report. This is the biggest news here. I assume they will primarily be focused on improving support for AMD cards if they are paid for by AMD.

    • A fair compromise really, and there are actually a few areas of Blender where AMD support is quite lacking so it probably wouldn't be a bad idea anyway.

      It's great news in any case, onwards and upwards for Blender!

    • Seamless support for AMD cards would be great (although I am an nVidia user), and would get Blender back to the system-agnostic software it used to be before Cycles/GPU rendering. However, if I were to render one frame of an animation in Cycles/CUDA, would it exactly match another frame rendered on AMD/OpenCL?

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