Developer Meeting Notes: June 1, 2014
A second test build for Blender 2.71 is now available. Please download, and help by reporting bugs! Also: new OpenSubdiv Blender code flowing back to Pixar, GSoC progress report.
Hi all,
Here are the notes from today’s meeting in irc.freenode.net #blendercoders.
1) Upcoming Blender 2.71 release
- Tracker bugs: still 185 open, but probably over 50 were closed in past week. There’s a whole lot of activity there now!
- Get the 2nd test build here.
- Meeting agrees to wait a week for the release (at least). All efforts to testing & fixing!
2) GSoC
- Students are getting started now, but things are a bit fuzzy still. They will get a reminder to make sure their project proposals, design docs, planning and midterm deliverables are being approved and endorsed as widely within the shortest possible time.
- OpenNurbs library (to read nurbs files from Rhino) is 70 MB (before linking). Student Jonathan deWerd will check if this can be stripped. Most of all he should check what (advanced) level of tessellation (display, render) is supported in nurbana or brl-cad.
- Ines Almeida (game engine fixes) has been busy with other work still, but next week she’ll start. First goal is meeting with the other GE devs to get a good understanding of priorities, and which bugs can go to the ‘todo’.
3) Other Projects
- Faster blur for compositor.
- Sergey Sharybin will submit OpenSubdiv fixes to Pixar: Cuda for dynamic loading.
- Lukas Treyer is working on a full recode and upgrade of DXF import in Blender.
Thanks to everyone, for some more great work!
OpenNurbs!!! Amazing! As a daliy Rhino user, I am greatly looking forward to proper nurbs integration into blender. This will bring blender into the architecture masses, not only as rendering solution but also as a conceptual modeling package.
I wish more people took Robert McNeel & Associates’ approach to open development. I sometimes find some copyleft restrictions to be just as annoying as some copyright restrictions. I’m glad Blender gets to benefit from this initiative.
Thanks to Robert McNeel & Associates for helping to make this possible, and to Jonathan deWerd for seeking to adapt it into Blender.
Oh, and good luck to all the student developers! Thank you all for your effort and time!
And wow, Sergey, how exciting is it to submit back fixes to Pixar’s own software?
A bet Pixar is buzzing like a poked bee hive right about know hahaha
that’s it, show them how to do it properly lol
Well, I don’t think Pixar would feel panic or anything disapproving here. The entire purpose of making software technology as open-source is often to see what other developers can do not only with the software, but also for the source code itself. While programmers are gods, they’re still human. If someone can find a human error, or improve upon something a little better, it’s usually appreciated, as it helps everyone.
Maybe OT but what will the impact be of the open-source version of Renderman on Blender? Would it make sense to integrate it into Blender?
This is my pie in the sky dreaming, but wouldn’t it be amazing if Pixar picked up Blender for its own use on films. I’ve heared that they use their own in-house software at the minute for animating/modelling etc, so it wouldn’t be too far of a stretch of the imagination that, if they were looking to re-vamp their own software, they might choose to switch to another application instead to save time/money. Blender could be a good choice for them, as they would have complete control over the code, as they do now, it’s multi-platform and will soon have OpenSubDiv. I can’t see any other CG application being viable, due to their closed nature and all, it would be more difficult to implement new features that they need for their films. Any features that they add could be given back to Blender trunk, helping push development by leaps and bounds. Pixar would also benefit, as the number of developers working on the software that they use would increase by a large amount without having to hire any extra people. From the bits and pieces I’ve picked up over the years, there seems to be some admiration of Blender from the Pixar people.
This would also line up with Ton’s goal of production companies that use Blender having their own developers, adding new features etc. No doubt, if Pixar started using Blender in its pipeline, other studios/production companies would jump on board. I’m sure there’s a mindset of “If Pixar’s using it, it must be good”
If this happened, Blender development would snowball and it would be like GSOC all year around…
Ok, time to stop daydreaming now, back to work…
Also, the free version of Renderman isn’t open source, it’s just a free licence for non-commercial work.