Ton Roosendaal shares the notes from yesterday's meeting in irc.freenode.net, #blendercoders.
Here are the notes from today's meeting in irc.freenode.net #blendercoders
1) Upcoming 2.72 release
- Project overview page in wiki.
- All the planned targets have been merged, BF team works full time on the tracker! Open issues went down to 155 last week, and over 100 new reports came in the last week.
- Ton Roosendaal suggests that Blender Foundation will provide free Blender Conference tickets for all active developers* again, if the open total gets below 100 for this release! Would that work? :) (Active dev = three or more commits to Blender release during last 12 months).
- Cycles switches to CUDA Toolkit 6.5, enables basic Volume support on GPU too. Everyone who builds Blender, please update the dev environment. for users no action is required.
2) Google summer of code
- All students have passed the final term. However, as mentioned on our GSoC student mailing list before, most of the students didn't finish their project yet. But we're positive that things can turn out to give a result when people would stay around.
- Please keep being involved here, also users to inspire the students to wrap it up.
- The Viewport project will get priority to become official release target with help from the core team.
3) Other projects
- Tamito Kajiyama: next steps for Freestyle & Blender NPR development have been discussed on the NPR list, feedback and inputs are very welcome!
- No news on OpenSubdiv, it will come back after the release... also awaiting OSD 3.0 release later this year.
- Gooseberry crew thinks of adding a studio-branch, to use in periods during which Blender's sources are locked for new features (BCon3-4-5). Meeting agrees that's OK, provided things (can) go straight to master after a release. Lukas Toenne will oversee and coordinate that.
Thanks,
-Ton-
7 Comments
What are the improvements scheduled for the "viewport project"?
If I'm not wrong it will be a great improvement not just to speed, but to functionality as we'll bringing it up to par with other 3d software
You can find a description of Viewport FX improvements here: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/GoogleSummerOfCode/2014
Finally viewport upgrades! I hope useful motion trail, ghost feature and ofcourse speed improvements!
This sounds very exciting: basic Volume support on GPU. Any more details on that? I don't see anything in the release notes
It was decided recently so I expect it will be in release notes "soon". It was already possible to build blender with CUDA volume support, the problem is the more features are added the bigger and slower the kernel of cycles becomes. The recently released CUDA 6.5 with volume enabled delivers roughly the same performance as 6.0 without. So now it will be enabled by default.
You can find the orginal dev conversation here: http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-cycles/2014-August/002051.html
Wow. I did a quick GPU volume scatter render and volumetrics are way speedier than CPU. This is IMHO the biggest 2.72 feature thus far. Thank you developers!