Developer Meeting Notes: August 3, 2014
Ton recaps the talking points and development progress in their latest meeting in irc.freenode.net, #blendercoders.
1) Upcoming 2.72 release
- Planning reminder
- Bug tracker: went back to over 200 open issues, too many! As usual everyone’s invited to help.
- Freestyle for Cycles patch is still waiting for sergey’s review decision
- Pie menus: almost done, but needs review for the UI default in release. Ton Roosendaal will sit down with Antony Ryokiotakis to check on it.
- Compositor memory optimization: waiting still too
- With too many unfinished 2.72 targets, meeting agrees on moving the release schedule at least with a week.
2) Google Summer of Code
- Grigory Revzin made a video about his shapekeys work!
3) Other projects
- Bastien Montagne reports he did some testbuilds of custom split normals last week.
One thing stands out over enything else for me: PIE MENUS!!!
I hope PIE MENUS are optional
O_o How could it possibly be non optional? Its in their nature, press the button – they appear.
Shape keys improvements!! YAY!!! :DD thank you Grigory Revzin, immpresive work :), thank you
btw if you have time, and is not hard to do (i dont know), could you please add an icon feature per shapekey, you know a screencapture of the mesh with a shapekey on, that gets displayed when you select that particular shapekey. It is something i have dream about, because when you have more than a few shapekeys it gets hard to remember wich one is wich, even when you rename each, anyway… thank you again Grigory Revzin, gladly immpress by the video, greetings!
please make pie menu’s optional if at all possible. don’t like them, won’t ever use them.hear ya go let’s have a vote, ya for them na against them. not that it’ll make a difference, but just for shit’s and giggles.
Ummmmmm, I might be missing something here, so please correct me if I’m wrong, but can’t you just avoid pressing the shortcut key to activate the pie menu?
Just because it’s there, doesn’t mean you have to use it…
No. I don’t fully understand what it is or how it works so I am terrified of the possibility that I might have to slightly alter my routine to accommodate it. The possibility of spending even 1 minute to figure it out and then get used to it is way too life threatening to handle. So, I’ll just make off-hand comments making my position clear about having to slightly alter routines regardless of whether or not it would make my life easier or harder or even if it indeed will alter my routine.
If it does turn out that I am required to change my routine when it does come out, I will then proceed to spend more time complaining about it whenever I can than it would take to just get used to it and learn to like it.
Yes… Pie menus will no doubt become so popular that we’ll all have to learn how to use them, as no doubt all other shortcuts and menus will be removed due to being useless. Jinkies! Imagine all the time that will be spent by all of the Blender users around the globe learning this complicated tool. The developer really should have weighed these consequences before spending time developing Pie Menus.
I won’t say I’m against the Pie Menu. I will say I’m against your logic. You act as if change is inherently good. Change is good only where it is good. If the change is not beneficial to someone, they shouldn’t use it.
This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t adapt at times in life–it’s more to say that if we should see if we can adjust the problem before we adapt to a solution.
For instance, I hated it when Blender changed the Add Object function to Shift-A instead of Spacebar, which was not only insanely more ergonomic, but it’s more intuitive as well.
Many Blender users adapted to this change, but as far as I’m personally concerned, simply adopting a change doesn’t necessary validate that the change was beneficial. People adapt to poor changes all the time.
To some people, Pie Menu will be beneficial. To others, it will not. Some people will work faster without Pie Menu. With myself personally, I think I’ll find the Pie Menu quite useful, though I do keep in mind that perhaps Pie Menu is someone else’s “Shift-A” situation.
The best way to solve a problem like this is very simple: Simply make the new feature optional. My problem with the Add Object issue was solved this way, with the Dynamic Spacebar Menu. Simply make the Pie Menu as toggleable, and everybody wins.
thank you for pointing out my ingnorance. the world need’s more people like you ;)
Don’t mention it ;)
A dedicated Layers-Manager would be wonderful. Such a script already exist but by now it should have become standard.
Agreed. The inability to name layers or reorder them just by dragging is an obvious missing feature. If that annoying Grease Pencil panel / tab (which is a non-essential tool but seems to appear everywhere) could be replaced with an essential ‘Layer Manager’ panel, it would be far more useful for far more users.
An integrated layers system, usable for all Modes, would be lovely. Especially for Sculpt Mode. I do the bulk of my sculpting in a dedicated sculpting program, but I would love to do layered Dyntopo sculpts, complete with layer merging operation, layer-based masking, morph targets and opacity control. It’s nice to work all within one application as long as possible. But one step at a time with Blender, I suppose. So many demands, too few developers.
What about the .fbx exporter renaming all of my bones upon export and not working in Unity3d?
I hope those pie menus will be fully customizable. I would love to use them to an extent but having them as the selector for everything drove me crazy.
Customization is a beautiful thing.
Until you need to use someone else’s computer (or they have to use yours).