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Blender Developers Meeting Notes, August 21, 2011

35

My personal highlight in this week's meeting notes: within three weeks, the Blender Development fund is already reaching €1000/month! Have you made a decision about donating yet?

Ton Roosendaal writes:

Here's a summary of today's topics:

1) Blender 2.59 status

  • Release reports are all good, no showstoppers really, so not an 'a' release needed (yet?)
  • OpenCollada compile fails on Linux Fedora.

2) Blender 2.60 planing

  • Release cycle proposal approved. Thomas updates the doc. (summary). (Martin Poirier amendment will be added "first week of BCon1, only module-owner approved fixes")
  • FFmpeg 0.8 migration will start.
  • Pepper branch: work on sound and animation system could go in, other branches probably too (motion capture file import, GE animation, Collada work). Proposal is to give at least a week everyone time for code review, via online codereview. Brecht & Campbell will help too, especially when reviews lack next sunday.
  • Peter Schlaile's branch on Sequencer Proxies approved, can go to trunk
  • Cycles render engine and Motion Tracking (tomato) is for 2.61.
  • Particle 2010 branch: approved. (Framing/looping feature hidden for now).
  • Other branches? Can people who added their branches ready here report if things are ready for final review? (See overview).
  • Schedule proposal for current release cycle:
    • BCon1 is now.
    • BCon2 start: 1 sept (final targets for 2.60 defined)
    • BCon3 start: 22 sept (branch mergers final)
    • BCon4 start 2 oct (testbuild, fixing only)
    • BCon5 start 9 oct (svn frozen, release a few days after)
  • Git discussion: we'll happily await a proposal, with a plan for how and who will tackle the tasks, keep history and SCM browse, what consequences would be for non-git experienced developers, why not Hg, like that.

3) Other projects

  • Ton reports Development Fund is reaching 1000/month. Will contact Jeroen Bakker to discuss OpenCL compositor project completion.
  • NVidia mailed as Siggraph follow-up, to support Mango project & developers with high-end cards, including Tesla. With AMD/ATI an appointment has been made at IBC conference Amsterdam (early September). Cooperation with Intel OpenGL team will be set up too.

4) Google Summer of Code.

  • Official "Pencils down" is Monday aug 22! Best GSoC ever! Not every student is finished though, but there's general interest to continue after the deadline too.
  • Students who want to get their work in 2.60 can discuss it with mentor how to prepare submission.

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.

35 Comments

  1. Development is going so fast !
    I'm so glad Blender is so ambitious and people around it are so motivated.

    After some minor donations (DVD, book etc.), I'm really thinking about supported the fundation.

    Great job to everyone !!

  2. Great work !

    But, I'm a little worried about two "old" projects : the Freestyle integration branch, and the Bmesh branch... I hoped we would see this projects included in the official Blender before Cycles or GSoC of this year, even if they are interesting too...

    Any idea if we can hope for inclusion of Bmesh and Freestyle in Blender 2.60, 2.61 or 2.62 ?

  3. Indeed brilliant work all round folks, loving 2.59 just now

    Although I need to figure out why my GLSL display ain't happening as it should, off to blender artists to scour for that one. :D

    Thnx for re-posting meeting notes as usual!

  4. Wow, thanks to all who put in so much hard work. The result can be seen. the 2.5x Blender is everything it was promised it was going to be and more. Looking forward to 2.6.
    thnx

  5. The meeting notes are delicious as usual, thanks to all the developers and people who contribute to this great 3D software!

  6. @yagraph, AFAIK, they are still on progress. People chime in on BMesh, and a lot of thing being ironed out on Freestyle. Just wait and see I guess, in the meantime you could always download their branch to play around.

  7. I would like to second the calls for BMESH & FreeStyle integration into trunk, I've been using both for years now, and REALLY hope to see them in trunk ASAP.

  8. The failure of the particle system to incorporate mesh particle orientation properly was a show stopper for me. I had to dump 2.59 and go back to 2.58a. I'll wait for the next version. I'm disappointed but still a devoted fan and supporter.

  9. Hi!,
    I have been following blender since the 2.30 or so. I think that it is now when Blender is getting atention from the business. The software is solid, and has many features, it is usable.
    I now it wan't a toy, but now you can see a very good tool to work with.

    Go on !!!

  10. BMesh is a cool feature that's true, but it is not indispensable to any 3D artist. I would much rather have a fully fonctionnal particles system or the new renderer before that.

  11. What I really appreciate is that I am well informed by developers whats to come, more or less when it is coming and so on!! Cycles for 2.61? YEAH!

    BIT OF OFFTOPIC
    Other OpenSource projects are literally killing me. Unless you are somehow involved and lurking on IRC - you know nothing. GIMP devs are throwing some info, ok. Rarely but they do.

    But MyPaint guys.. Damn - website is dead, forum pretty much same - yet I know that devs are actually working and they have quite a few new things working already on linuks. What about windows? Nobody knows, nobody even bothers - doesnt matter where I ask. I would prefer to know that there will be no windows version then constantly looking for news about it. I dont know how to compile software but I hear every time that it is really easy. If it is - please do it and place it on your site for crying out loud! PLEASE!
    Krita - another project that has just as informative website like my dead grandma... Also I heard about some windows version coming in, but hell if anybody knows anything.

    Compare to those two I feel GREAT looking at all that really detailed info Blender devs are providing! Two thumbs up!

  12. @twitcher

    The difference is Ton. He has business background and he runs Blender as a company severely devoted to a cause. He has made a lot of quite good choices and not only can (probably) earn a living from Open Source: he also gets this warm and fuzzy feeling of helping hundreds of people.

    Whereas other OSS projects are mostly side quests for the programmers.

  13. Irve - no doubt about it. Every boat needs a captain. And hell - I couldn't be more happy with blender. It actually made me excited about 3D once again.

  14. Mention of BMesh in the 2.6 development plans was conspicuous by its absence. Oversight? or is the direction of this project not clear enough to give it mention?

  15. aussieb123 - I am precisely making a little job and importing collada files from Sketchup. Problem is that Sketchup is exporting it in funny way I guess. I got it to work this way - in sketchup, before exporting I am selecting all (ctrl+a) and going to edit/last position in menu (group/components)/expolode. I am repeating it until no "explode" option will be possible. Then I do edit/last position in menu (XXXX entities)/explode curve. Something that last one isnt available. Then exporting to collada with all options off except for "triangulate all". And it is working. After importing to Blender it most probably will be HUGE and sometimes not visible to camera but you can just press A to select all and then S and scale it down. Maybe that is noob way to import but thats the one I figured out that is working.
    Anywyas topology of models from sketchup is a joke. Also they have lots of normals to be fixed. Sketchup models look cool inside of sketchup but if you are doing something from scratch I strongly recommend doing it in Blender. You can keep your topology clean and avoid loads of problems.

  16. PTEX! PTEX! PTEX!

    I'd also love to see the Skin modifier some day.
    Hopefully the new sculpt cursors too and other jwilkins code too?

  17. The GSoc projects and Cycles are nice, but BMesh and FreeStyle are much more important to the growth of Blender, in my opinion. I hope that the Blender developers will not overlook BMesh and FreeStyle for the final release.

  18. Good news! +1 for Git!

    For an example, Drupal switched to Git from CVS. They had SVN as candidate, but after big community discussions they chose Git. As Drupal is a rather big, community development heavy open source project, they might have valuable findings that could help Blender devs decide.

    http://www.lullabot.com/blog/git-coming-soon-drupalorg
    http://buytaert.net/drupal-contributor-statistics-2011

    ( Plus I started contributing to Drupal after they migrated to Git...I always wanted to do something with Blender too, Git would make it a bit easier for me to start contributing! )

    Cheers,
    Gergely Tamas Kurucz

  19. Great news!

    +1 for Git! Using it as a contributor to Drupal, great stuff! I assume it would make it a bit easier to drop in and start developing anything for Blender (core, add-ons)!

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