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Developer Meeting Notes, April 8, 2012

30

Even during Easter, Blender development continues!

Thomas Dinges writes:

Hey everyone and Happy Easter! :)

Today's meeting notes:

1) Blender 2.63 progress

  • Sergey reports we have less and less critical issues in the bug tracker. Remaining issues: high memory usage of undo stack (might be fixed for 2.64?) and game engine crashes with textured meshes
  • Campbell reports on his work this week.
  • We agreed on doing a first release candidate middle of the week (11/12 April).
  • Support for Kepler GPUs (Cycles/CUDA) will be provided as extra download. People who want to test these cards can then download a small zip archive with the needed render kernels. The CUDA 4.2 toolkit is still too unstable for general usage. We stick with Toolkit 4.0.
  • Release logs in progress, help is welcome!

2) Current projects

  • Francisco De La Cruz (XercesBlue) has been added as SVN commiter. He already fixed some bugs and added Vertex slide. Welcome :)
  • Ed Halley reports progress on his outline modifier.
  • Howard Trickey made some progress on the rounded bevel addon.

Google Summer of Code

  • Deadline for submissions was on Friday, we have 45 proposals which we will check on in the upcoming days. Lot of work! :)
  • Accepted proposals will be announced on 23rd of April.

 

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.

30 Comments

  1. I've asked about this before but can we please have the cycles camera-color-presets-thingy back? It was available in the first cycles versions but now it's long gone. It was a fast and easy way to color corect or set a special 'tone' for your cycles renders. It was a simple dropdown menu if I remember well, would love to see it back.

          • Kirill Poltavets on

            Man, don't wait, just buy some good and cheap (~100$) CUDA card. I wrote about this already.. two or three times. It's worthy and it works FINE.

          • I have ok Cuda card. Cycles works great but for serious use I'll need to to upgrade.

            BUT comparing new NVidias to Radeons I'm in serious doubt. It seems AMD is cheaper per "horsepower" and what is not less important they don't try to rob their buyers of features so hard. I mean things like crippling otherwise great products to sell more bizarre-priced stuff. Haven't tested myself but many online opinions on GTX680 state it is designed badly. Lack of competition for NVidia surely made some negative consequences for end-user. Maybe AMD will be back soon. Of course this all is only a speculation, but what is not is that Nvidia products double in price for every 20-50% of power, while AMD keeps price/performance ratio linear, so it would be really interesting to see some fair compare of same higher-end cards for Cycles, at least in "clay" mode. Maybe there really is more potential for OpenCL. That's only Maybe though.

          •  I agree that
            competition is good and monopolies bad. I read about the gpu compute
            of the 680s being quite crappy. I also heard that it is early days
            and too soon to tell.

            I have a 3GB GTX 580
            and am very happy with its performance.

            Cycles is working with
            OpenCL and it is their drivers that's the problem. I am hoping that
            AMD comes to the party in case Nvidia starts crippling their game
            card's gpu computing.

        • OpenCL support has been there from teh start... AMD just havent had the drivers that were capable... This has changed, since they released the 12.4 drivers that include the opencl update, cycles in basic mode works... and has been enabled for the trunk... its just really slow and crappy at the moment.

    • I have a Radeon 6970m on my laptop and I really want to use it for rendering with Cycles, but it seems that OpenCL is not ready... it's what I heard from some developers, so I guess we must wait until it's stable.

      I would also add that I prefer Cycles to be improved with new functionalities and speed on CPU side before it is ported to any GPU parallel computing framework (OpenCL, CUDA).

  2. Does this rounded bevel must be an addon? Can't it be 'merged' into existing bevel just as a switch normal/rounded ? 
    Working with addons is quite cumbersome as I usually can't change the settings later.

    • Please be this, built in for speed, reliability and keeping up to date. ( modifier too ) Heres hoping, but looks really useful already, been hanging out for a rounded bevel/ chamfer type thing.

  3. Kirill Poltavets on

    Vertex slide, Outline modifier and Rounded bevel - really really cool! :) I love all this (not counting constant bug fixes arriving of course)!
    ^________^

    • this is not a targeted CAD-like program, you know? It's mainly for artists. Maybe in a future we could have an optional Blender mode (like Cycles mode does) that could enable a different way to model (parametric) with appropriate tools in it. Maybe...

  4. I really like the geometry produced by that rounded bevel. Too bad that Blender dont support quad subdivision scheme with combined loop scheme for triangles. That outline modifier seems awesome! Where can one find out more?!

  5. Campbell, do you ever sleep? I mean you must be programming yourself into the early hours of the morning... Please take care of yourself, health wise and family wise. I am just getting over extreme fatigue that was caused from over working (14-20 hour days for months). It ain't fun to have to recover after your body says "No more!"

     Back on topic though, thank you very much devs for all your hard work once again. It feels like we are witnessing something special every release. I rarely hear other software vendors get such praise from their customers other than pixologic. 

     I can't wait to see what the future brings from all the gsoc submissions this year. I am glad that BF has been more focused on gettings fewer features, just good quality ones. To all the students in for the long summer, best of luck if you get approved. :)

  6. Big big thanks to the Devs, that are working so hard. Blender is just becoming a monster.

    I have some issue with the particles though. Made some grass and also made a little composition. Crashes 2 times or 3 before working fine. Using official release 2.62.

    One question. Was there a team working on the Blender wiki?

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