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Blender Developers Meeting Notes

8

codeThis week with a couple of calls for help: verification of module owners, new OpenGL developers and special effects for Durian.
Current projects

  • Maxime Curioni mailed that he prefers to withdraw as developer for Freestyle (non photo real render). His own software engineering career has priority now. Co-developer Tamito Kajiyama will take over his maintainer role.
  • Thomas Dinges has updated module owners list, still needs verification by all devs. Check it!

Blender 2.5, next release

  • Brecht van Lommel merged sculpt in official code tree, with a great good positive acclaim. Issues reported are mostly opengl related.
  • Help needed! We need OpenGL developers who can compile and test Blender in different configurations, especially ATI and Intel (gfx) environments. This for sculpting (partial update, VBO) and buffer methods (double, triple, draw to texture).
  • We're still waiting for a release target list for the first official beta. Ton will discuss it this week with Matt, Brecht and Campbell too.
  • William Reynish updated todo list in wiki for UI stuff.
  • Roger Wickes points to fact we need more docs from coders! We can't repeat this too often: any feature committed should be documented... no doc, no commit!
  • Proposal: try to freeze specs for Blender WindowManager and UI APIs for the next release too.
  • Martin Poirier works with Matt Ebb on more usable design/implementation for Keymap editor.
  • More release target ideas: Default key maps, Installation configurations, theme/layout/screen switching, multi-window usage, toolbar layouts.

Durian

  • Planning for artist's work will be final this week, also means the required developer topics will get more clear. Ton suggests to at least reserve a full month studio development time for the next 2.5 beta.
  • A lot of fun special effects are open still... but if people want to play? Try melting icicles, good long hair physics, snow and debris avalanches. Check "get involved" on the Durian website.

-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.

8 Comments

  1. Oh no Maxime Curioni dropped :(

    Cool that Tamito Kajiyama will take over, but I imagine how hard it is to mess with other people code and catch up fast.

  2. What a relief!! When i built from the svn i was thinking the sculpt mode was completely broken, as i erroneously tried to sculpt with the new merged sculpt system over a mesh previously sculpted :D
    The "Fast navigate" option (i dont noticed before, but i'm not certain) is very useful, but, maybe, an additional resolution level (or an option in user preferences to select the desired resolution level for Fast Navigate) it'd be more useful, as the geometry isn't distinguishable in symmetrical meshes

  3. The latest new sculpt still seems slower than the 2.49b. Does anyone also observe this? On my Linux x64 8GB RAM, they both maxed out at 1.6M polygons, but at 1.6M, 2.49b with partial refresh on is still smooth, but the new sculpt in 2.5 is not as smooth even with optimize options on. They both are very slow at 6.4Million polygons. Thanks.

  4. Blender 2.5 suddenly quited (rashed) when using sculpt mode with high number of polygons. it also crashed when trying to render an image with high resolution. (Macos 10.5.8 on macbook Pro). Some road ahead for 2.5, I suppose.

  5. On my system, this mornings build (25397) runs smooth with optimised display at 5 million faces while 2.49b struggles at about 5 second per frame with about 1.5 million faces.
    maybe due to 2.49b being an official build and 2.5 being a native build. :/
    my system:
    1.8Ghz core2 duo x64
    kubuntu 9.04
    2GB ram
    GeForce 8700M GT w/ 512MB VRAM

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