Bmesh, Bmesh, BMesh. Oh, and some other projects :)
Ton Roosendaal writes:
Hi all,
Here's a summary of today's topics:
1) Current projects and next release
- Bmesh has been migrated! About 75 issues were reported for it last week, 40 fixed already.
- Bmesh bug tracker gets merged back in normal tracker (by Campbell).
- Urgent todo: get our Bmesh docs fixed, and clean up wiki.blender.org for old bmesh docs. Like this.
- Campbell checks the low level code docs in ./source/blender/bmesh/docs/
- Python scripters: check the new Bmesh api docs here (much more powerful than old api):
- http://www.blender.org/documentation/blender_python_api_2_62_0/bmesh.utils.html
- http://www.blender.org/documentation/blender_python_api_2_62_0/bmesh.types.html
- Jens Verwiebe reports on further progress related to the Lux/Cycles compile issues. In short: they changed Lux to only export API symbols that are really needed. This solves all Boost library conflicts now.
- Nicholas Bishop has two patches ready for review (1,2). One restores partial visibility feature for sculpting, the other is more technical :)
- Daniel Stokes has progress on Game Engine "Harmony" project - improving light and shadows.
- Another cool patch is waiting, for Japanese input in Blender, seeks reviewer.
- Lukas Toenne has a new Node editing too, for easily detaching nodes.
- Ton reminds developers to make sure you use this page to propose patches for the next release, which is linked here.
2) Other projects
- Ton mentions it would be great to refresh our UI maintainer team, with experienced and competent people, to make more efficient decisions on proposals.
Thanks,
44 Comments
I think one or two aspects of the Python API are still incomplete. For example, what is the point of a BMLoop object? You get one from BMFace.loops, but then what? Shouldn’t a BMLoop contain a reference to faces, edges or vertices somewhere? As it is, it only points to other BMLoop objects.
The meeting notes don't make this clear, but the BMesh Python API is still a work in progress.
vert/edge/face attributes for BMLoop's are now in.
See: http://www.blender.org/documentation/blender_python_api_2_62_0/bmesh.types.html#bmesh.types.BMLoop
Ta! :)
"Ton mentions it would be great to refresh our UI maintainer team, with
experienced and competent people, to make more efficient decisions on
proposals."
Great ! at last !
Why? It's not clear to me, could you explain?
Thanks.
It isn't for me either. Maybe the UI has begun to grow anarchically once more.
In any case, the persons in question must also have a lot of moral fortitude and courage: everyone who even vaguely uses Blender or even don't use it but still can criticize it has their own, idiosyncratic, opinion on the UI and is sure that it is the only right one possible.
I personally think the Blender UI is the greatest thing there is. I don't understand why people are complaining about it. I have a strong feeling that the people that complain about the UI have not used blender 2.5x or higher.
In general I agree that Blender has great UI, but there are severe mistakes. For instance - some viewport buttons are not duplicated in menus (like "only include cur. rel. to sel. obj." filter in graph-ed.). The reason they should is that there must always be at least one menu containing all related options so there is one place to look searching if that option exists at all.
I didn't know of existence of that filter for a year because of that :)
Also there is a very important omission in dropdown list of Modifier menu. Pressing letter on keyboard should bring selection to modifier starting with that letter (and cycle through if there's more than one). This should apply to all dropdowns where there is no search field, as it eliminates about 1-5 wasted seconds every time you choose something, especially if you're not familiar with it's exact location.
There's a duplicate icon in 3D viewport in edit mode, "Limit selection to visible" and "snap to itself". Being an icon it looses it's meaning if there's a duplicate.
Panels do not scroll up if there's not enough content to be visible. An empty panel with scroll is shown. If in rush one may mistake that for empty panel and that something didn't work. Happens to me all the time.
Can't remember at moment but there's much more..
Ok, there are a couple of mistakes like that. Specifically the properties panel thingy can indeed be annoying.
Can you create bugs for these?
You mean a bug report?
Perhaps what Ton means, is that with all the additions to blender (mostly cycles and tracking) the UI runs the risk of losing consistency. Unless there is a strong UI team that can make decisions on how those new features should present themselves to the user.
However, I think that the combination of users and developer (like the dynamic duo Sergey and Sebastian) will make sure everything smooths out during mango.
The problem is - when there is some suggestion for a UI change, at the moment we dont have a group of people with a vision about the UI who are empowered to make decisions - we only get devs voting on it but this isnt a good way to move forward.
- Making changes 1 by 1 based on popularity just isnt great - you want people who think of the bigger picture - UI/usability issues, consistency etc.
I personally don't think that the Blender UI needs "bigger picture" kind of changes. Besides a few issue, as mentioned by Konstantins above, it just works great.
I'm a bit afraid that when there is team dedicated to the UI, the UI will keep changing, because that will be the "job" of that team. And I don't think we want the UI to change that much. Perhaps if, at least during Mango, the artists present in Amsterdam can make a wish-list.
Indeed, the big picture is as good as it gets. More consistency in details would be nice :)
Do you still have William Reynish working for you? The guy who wrote “The Evolution Of Blender’s User Interface” in 2008, which architected the 2.5/2.6 UI rework?
Campbell I sus to use Softimage XSI with has one of the best UI's out.
I'll give a UI draft fro blender a shot.
IMHO, Blender UI needs some tweak options that could be editable in user preferences. Something like "novice, advanced, expert" and/or "simplified, medium, extended". And probably it can be a starting point for deciding what to change/stay in UI.
I know that my comment isn't suggesting something revolutionary and actually doesn't answers the question about "a group of people"... but I don't know what to say here.
There always improvements to be made to UI.
AMAZING!
so happy for me, and all the blender guys! should donate soon !!
sad. as I feared cycles development is stopped. Only bmesh for a release.
It hasn't stopped. It just that BMESH is a very big project so that is the only thing the are putting into 2.63 this is to make sure that the have time to fix all the big issue that are likely to come up with such a big change in code like BMESH. Cycles is been used for the mango project so I think they can't afford to stop working on it
Check the release plan. 2.63 is the bmesh release, so logically, it deals only with bmesh and related topics.
2.64 is the release meant to prep for mango. That means cycles, tracking, etc. and perhaps even compositing (tile branch).
This has all been announced.
Good one ! :D :D :D :D
@ AngelaAndersson:
Cycles will make renders look much better, but Bmesh will make modeling and many Blender operations much better, and we've been waiting for it for several years now. I'm personally glad they're making Bmesh a higher priority first and then still finishing Cycles. But they haven't stopped developing Cycles--that assumption is not even close.
Besides, if push comes to shove, you can always use a GPU-accelerated external renderer for now if I just need an extra touch of shine from a renderer (and really, you can already use the progress made with Cycles so far with some compositing to produce some impressive results), but Bmesh saves much time with modeling and will revolutionize many Blender tools. In fact, I'm waiting on Bmesh's completion myself--I'd myself would like to develop a polygon-to-hair conversion operations (no promises yet, but if my schedule permits, I hope to have a working Add-On developed sometime by June or July, because I'd mostly be adapting this work already done as a SIGGRAPH paper to Blender).
So, you see, quite a lot is riding on the completion of Bmesh, a little more than Cycles right now, though Cycles is still important and still being actively developed. It's just that Bmesh is the target of the next official release. The time you will save with Bmesh modeling and with both Bmesh-enhanced and completely new Blender operations, you can put into rendering and compositing.
Cycles already as passes, so for most things you don't even need the blender internal renderer anymore. One thing I'm really missing is using an image sequence as a texture in cycles rendered animation. I'm guessing this is important for mango as well.
this isn't the case - if you check the commit logs you'll find the main cycles dev (Brecht), isn't doing many BMesh commits.
Meh - I know people get frustrated when a feature they're interested in doesn't get some love in a release, but this passive-aggressive trolling really isn't called for (particularly when the perpetrator never acknowledges!).
In fact, one of the best things about the Bmesh merge is that all the people who bitched on every release about the supposed lack of progress are finally going to quit yapping - or, more likely, find something else to complain about!
1000...0 thanks guys..
I have a dream, please integrate intel Embree to blender ,many people dont have a good GPU.
go to #cycles or #blendercoders or #blendercompilers and propose that, Abdu
Buy one, then. Good GPUs for rendering are cheap, nowadays. Cycles is a new render engine, supporting obsolete hardware has no meaning.
blender got perfection! :>
Just wanted to say , awesome render at top header .
sitting at bros oversmoked keybord as my mashine has been smoked since mid last week so in desperate state an search for replacement but already looking at some NVidia to buy.
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Honestly, you need to dig-in some true hardware forum to find out some decision of your troubles.
Is the windows version of 2.62 going to be updated with the reverted audio libraries? It was in last week's meeting but haven't seen it appear on the blender download page yet.
so.. is that mean that "Harmony" will be available in 2.63 release? Whow, i thought it can't make it for 2.63!
This is a very very exciting news. For me personally, Harmony project for BGE is like Cycles for Blender. Thanks a million devs! .
Hope so. Yeah, Harmony's pretty important for us BGE users. I'm waiting for orthographic shadows! :D
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I do love blender! Nothing more to say ;-)
People, do I need to report a bug about .obj import? It's not working. I didn't tried all variants but my files converted from .iges (with ngons) gives errors and no import.
r44226 works good but no ngons there :)