Developer Meeting Notes, May 12, 2013
The Blender developers are wrapping up 2.67 and have started to define the features for 2.68.
Here’s the notes from today’s meeting in irc.freenode.net #blendercoders.
1) Blender 2.67 release review
- Not many critical bugs reported yet, apart from crasher in new Mesh 3D print toolbox. Freestyle also does awesome!
- Campbell Barton has a list of fixes (10-12) he’d like to see applied in the release branch though. He’ll mail that to this list for review. To be safe, we probably will release a 2.67a then. Decision can be made next meeting.
2) Next release planning and targets.
The planning proposal:
- BCon1: May 08 (define targets, get branches reviewed & ready)
- BCon2: May 26 (add branches to svn, targets are defined)
- BCon3: June 09 (testing and fixing period)
- BCon4: June 22 (provide test builds, fixing only)
- BCon5: June 30 (svn frozen, release a few days after)
Candidate targets for 2.68:
- Multi-view (stereoscopic) render and display support.
- Upgrade to OpenEXR 2.0
- Motion tracking – ‘auto key’.
- Cycles Ubershader’ (combining diffuse, glossy, transparent, emission, fresnel)
- Pie menus
- Rigid Body constraint editing and visualization
- 3D Viewport render for Blender Internal
- Save and load “template” blend files (like managing multiple startups)
- Freestyle SVGWriter.
- Preserve vertex normals (for imported model renders)
- New Explode Modifier
- Option for Solidify to give minimal thickness
OK… we’ll be busy! :)
3) Other projects
– Ton Roosendaal confirmed we should formalize roadmap for 2.7x/2.8x series. He’ll write something for review asap.
– On a ‘major’ release step we can also accept compatibility breakage for features.
Initial list of breaking is here:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.5/Source/Development/Todo/Compatibility_Breaking
SVG writing is great news! It is just what we’ve been looking for. We want to use blender to design our optical setups, to make pretty schematics with it, but also to use the geometry drawn in blender as input for some optical simulations of laser beam sizes etc. We were looking for some form of vector output for that to make pretty graphs!
Agreed. This will allow us to model something once in Blender, then use it for both rendered ‘artistic’ views and for creating the basis of dimensioned drawings.
Stereoscopic
Auto Key
Cycles Ubershader
A W E S O M E
Pie menus ! …here we come! :D
> Cycles Ubershader’ (combining diffuse, glossy, transparent, emission, fresnel)
Now, that will give amazing control over material creation. Looking forward to that.
No, we already have “amazing control” with the current basic nodes.
This will give us “amazing ease of use”, and that, of course, is great! ;)
Hey great realease !
Many thanks and congrats to the devs.
Any thought given to implementing volumetric shaders (smoke, fire, …) into cycles ? or baking diffuse GI to a texture for game/video ?
Cheers,
______
JG
Volumetric shaders have been worked on for cycles, there are probably test videos if you look around.
As for baking GI, you can bake the blender internal bounce lighting already (Not the greatest, but better than nothing), and cycles texture baking has been acknowledged, although I don’t think ever prioritized.
Great news! Pie menus would be really terrific for work speed up.
But how about some Python API improvements? For example custom properties are still a big pain to deal with, if you need them to be more dynamic. It would be very handy to be able to create a new space types. A real nightmare for me personally is to control mutable external data from Blender UI, while storing its results into Blend file for later export.
This is important thing for implementation of many work pipelines. So please…!
please consider an update on the grease pencil :) ala Disney´s paperman or Disney´s Tarzan deeep canvas, pretty please with a cherry on top :), a much wanted improvment for the NPR guys
Preserve vertex normals! Great news! This should make Blender much more usable for product viz.
I know! I’ve been waiting forever for this. Very happy to see it happen.
Heavily looking forward to the 3d viewport render for blender internal. and its great to hear that the good old blender internal will be staying, as I still use it, and love it.
altho not to put down cycles, its awsome! And also looking forward to the new explode modifier!
thanks guys!!!
Did they mention any updates about the Google Summer of Code?
There won’t be any updates until Google announce who was sponsored later this month (the 24th IIRC)
It’s already possible to activate the 3d viewport render for blender internal ( use the debug mode > CTRL + ALT + D and set the value to -1 ) and I love it!
I don’t know if it’s a bug or something but the perspective in solid and rendered view are slightly different.
What I would love to see is that while in edit mode you can immediately see your changes in the rendered view, WITHOUT having to go to Object mode so that you can edit in fact edit in real time.
I like to edit with to windows, one for editing and one for a rendered view. But now to see the changes in the rendered view, I need to switch between Object en Edit mode.
And now with the 3d viewport render for blender internal, this function would be even more usefull.
How often have pie menus been in that list now? haha.
Nice stuff to look ahead to!
Any word on NumPy integration? It was proposed a while back, and it would be tremendously useful. (And, I think, not too complicated to add, at least as these things go?)
How about viewport preformance improvements that would be nice also.
My favorite things to look forward to:
• Cycles Ubershader — will ease material creation.
• Pie menus — will improve workflow
• 3D Viewport render for Blender Internal — great! And proves that BI isn’t dead at all.
• Freestyle SVGWriter — great! Vector output from toon renders is very welcome.
• Option for Solidify to give minimal thickness — very useful for 3D print modeling.
Go Blender devs! ㋡
Will there be support for the Oculus Rift in 2.68?