Developer Meeting Notes, October 7, 2012
Blender 2.64a – a bugfix release that fixes some critical issues – will be released this week.
Hi all,
Here are the notes from today’s meeting in irc.freenode.net, #blendercoders
1) Blender 2.64 release
- It seems there are some serious issues in the release, making an ‘a’ update required. Sergey and Campbell will list this all carefully. Mentioned were:
- Starting Blender from directory with non-ascii characters crashes (OpenColor)
- Adding new empty objects were always put at origin.
- After reviewing a lot of variations (‘a’ release this week, in two weeks, or a faster next release end of month), the meeting agreed on the following: 2.64a this week!
- End of tuesday, Campbell+Sergey+Brecht will have applied the most important (and well tested) bug fixes in the 2.64 branch, which then will get released as 2.64a on wednesday. (Note: remember to stick to 2.64 tagged libs too, boost and oiio libs were updated).
2) Targets for 2.65
- Thomas Dinges: Open Shading Language support + custom shaders.
- Daniel Genrich: his smoke branch, the GSoC smoke project, and laplacian smooth GSoC project.
- Campbell Barton: the GSoC weight-paint-transfer branch.
- Bastien Montagne pointed at his proposal for extracting translation strings from code.
Ton Roosendaal mentioned that we better stop doing this, and make a system that uses rna defined names. This is an old discussion – the UI scripts should stop making up own names to start with. Will come back later.
Thanks,
-Ton-
More BGE upgrades please.
Game engine game engine game engine game eng…
:)
I was scratching my head with the empty always added at the center of the world as well! No worries people, take your time!
I’d also love to see the Bullet Physics in the viewport for 2.65, but I guess I’ll have to wait. Tbh I would prefer a stable build, a bug free (if possible) version for a future release. Blender is PACKED with features and improvements as it is now.
I haven’t yet tested with 2.64, but this bug with object loaded at origin already existed with 2.63a , and sometimes not only for Empties ! I checked in preferences as it seemed to be a user choice, but noticed no difference between the two available modes.
The most exciting future feature for me is Dyntopo, PTex integration, and general Sculpting improvements (in performances and functionality).
I love blender, perhaps blender should have a system to update itself and external plug-ins :)
Thanks for all the great work!
Any update on fur/hair system in Cycles?
Thank you.
Not that soon. Afaik the priorities are the same as illustrated on this roadmap: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.6/Source/Render/Cycles/Roadmap, it’s just a bit behind schedule.
Volume, motion blur and sss next, and then hair. Some performance stuff probably in between.
A lot of work has already been done on volume and motion blur so I supposed they won’t take too long to be implemented. I am not a developer and this is all speculation of course.
I am also eagerly waiting for hair. I just hope that I don’t get a project soon which requires hair as I will need to change my render for that project.
Even though development has fallen a little bit behind I am still very optimistic about cycles’ future.
I have finished my first commercial project with cycles and it is very reliable. The render layers are well thought through and works fantastic, thanks to project Mango.
My hats off to the developers for this latest build. Great job so far guys. What I would like to see in upcoming versions is more uv support. Better uv tools would be nice. Thanks guys.
Really a big thanks to the Ton and the Devs. I’m really grateful to you guys for making such a great software. Blender is just geting better and better.
Like last time I would make a little request for the documentation. Its really great have new features, but with no proper documentation its sometimes hard to fully understand them. Just a little note: big thanks to the dudes who do tutorials I would not know a lot of things without you guys.
I personally hope for other improvements to the BGE, such as perhaps some tessellation support someday soon. And while I haven’t tested it out in the Blender 2.64 yet, but I hope Blender supports shadows for transparency with alpha textures (useful for leaves on trees and stuff), as it was lacking this feature the last time I checked. I’ll have to check it out again with Blender 2.64, though.
I’m also hoping for improvements of Cycles’ performance in rendering larger complex scenes, as it seems to be slower than in past Cycles releases. But I think they’re already working on that, so I’ll wait.
Though, I personally would like it if Blender allowed you the option to keep the system console toggled off upon booting up Blender. It’s not a big deal, but it’s a nice touch I’d hope to see soon.
On a similar point, I wish Blender would remember its screen location between sessions! I use Blender stretched across two monitors, but every time I start up it’s always compressed onto my primary monitor. Old Blender 2.4x would accept command line switches to set the screen position at start-up, but this has been sadly lost since 2.5x.
It would be great to have more bugs fixed before more features added.
For a good working software this is the most important.
Maybe 2.65 should be a bugfix release so the bugs go under 150 or so.
Anoki