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Blender Developer Notes: May 3, 2015

28

Highlights: OpenSubdiv is planned for 2.76, Cycles Portals for 2.75, and Jens Verwiebe, the maintainer for the OS X binaries passes on his activities.

Ton writes:

Hi all,

Here are the notes from today's meeting in irc.freenode.net #blendercoders.

1) Planning for the next release (2.75)

  • A number of bigger projects are still not ready. After checking the status, the meeting agreed on allowing two projects to get another week before finalizing and merged in Git master. These are: AMD's Cycles Kernel Split and New Dependency Graph. Sergey Sharybin will work on that. For the rest it's "BCon3" now - no new features, all focus on fixing and testing!
  • OpenSubdiv: is now on the list to get merged for the July release (2.76).
  • Same for Freestyle Memory consumption improvements - goes to 2.76 too.
  • Cycles "Portals" got in.
  • Updated project planning.
  • Blend4Web team urges everyone to check on this patch. Would be essential for release.

2) Other topics

  • Our very active OS X platform maintainer for many years, Jens Verwiebe - had a suprising statement. He's going to abandon OS X as a serious 3D/graphics development platform. This, he said, because of lack of quality GPU support (OpenGL, OpenCL) and annoying Yosemite glitches. It makes this platform too painful to keep using seriously. Jens will stay around for at least the 2.75 release. Martijn Berger volunteered to
    take over duties.

Thanks,

-Ton-

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.

28 Comments

  1. Sorry to hear that OS X is giving devs a hard time. I'm no Mac user, but I've used a macbook on occassion in the past, and certain college courses were based on Macs, so I suppose it's no comfort to read this news.

    In other notes, really am looking forward to the stable release of 2.75. The symmetrical paint tool is a Godsend in and of itself, even though the version I'm working with seems to no like Blender Render (crashes to desktop when creating a new material or switching from Cycles materials to BlenRen mats.)

    Keep up the hard work! :D

  2. thank you, Jens Verwiebe, for your past work! blender has always been running nicely on my mac computers : )

  3. winnertakesteve on

    OS X has always been ok for me as a workstation, but yeah if you need raw power I don't think you can beat hardware options of Windows.

    Perhaps this is related, but the hair sim improvements in OS X 2.74 official don't seem to work for me. At all. They were working in a gooseberry branch I tried out, but no dice in the official release. Anyone else experience similar?

  4. Odd I run a 2008 old MacPro with 2 Nvidia GTX 970 GPUs and all works perfect. I would never step down from OS X Yosemite as this is finally a perfect OS for media design.

    • I have 2008 MacPro also and I toally agree with him, I will change to PC. Yes, I have TITAN, but that is not officially supported, so you run it on your own risk, also everything else is getting old, there is no usb 3 and other new standarts for RAM and so on.. and if you want all that stuff, you must buy the new MacPro recycle bin, where you can't just put in any GPU you want.. and officially they offer only ATI Fire Pro cards.

      • Obviously if you use a Titan and there is no real OS X driver thats bad. Titan X or the 900 generation are supported well. Under Win7 I have a lot of Blender UI bugs with NVIDIA.

        But truth is if you want CUDA the new as you called them recycling bins which are insanely silent and space efficient (we have the labs filled for our Maya workstations) are really a shot against the wall. Those are well designed and build PCs just really specialized and it suck Apple killed the old MacPro module system. For your RAM the only usable is then then 2012.

        On my Windows side I run Revit and Inventor Pro and thats pretty much it. For the rest Win7 is still not that good.

        I am curious if they will at one point offer NVIDA cards with those MPs. If you want to buy a Xeon PC with the same specs you pay the same. However i7 chips are darn fast if you get a six core. But with the Xeons you can get dual CPU boards.

      • Try moving to windows you'll be running back to OS X in no time
        You'll need update your computer 200 times a day and it still works slow,not stable and vulnerable to almost anything on the web
        And on any click you do windows has to ask 900 questions that you don't care about... And retina support is a joke
        Not to mention windows 8 ui and the tendency of windows software to have the stupid ribbon on top(worse ui decision you can make)

        you have a Mac that is 7 years old its natural that it won't support technologies that were released after its production
        no matter if you had a pc or a Mac a motherboard from 2008 has pci-E 2.0 that won't run the Titan very well anyway and most chances you wouldn't get use 3.0 support either

        About the round new Mac you get it with amd only and yes it sucks I can't argue with amd being sucks...

        You can try building a hackintosh

        • I agree here on both.

          The MacPro is out dated however works perfect for me. I also run Win7 and it is a terrible OS. There are certain perks for working with media Win just is bad at. Nothing like preview. Cannot drag a file into a dialog to select it - Win wants to copy it. Many things might be minor but making working with OS X very comfortable. And speed wise? Win7 is not really as an OS much faster. Both Win and OS X are bloated. Linux? Good luck with software and dont get me started with "Use GIMP".

          Once my MacPro dies I will not buy the new MacPro. First way to expensive and second I need NVIDIA GPUs. But when my MacPro runs under full load that 2008 machine is still clam. Well they just did not only build an aluminum shell but also thought about proper airflow and noise levels.

          If Apple at that point - and I fully agree - continues this terrible iProduct line (iMacs are not bad for what they are intended for) I will go with a Hackintosh as well. I cannot and will not give up OS X and I am not an Apple die hard at all.

          • apple fans spoted...Linux For workstaions
            (dreamworks pixar weta ILM ect ) and windows for
            gaming and multimedia.hands down!
            PS:your iphone 6 is awesome even if it costs 1k
            has a dual core 1.4 cpu with 1gb of ram and 720p screen
            it's a lot better than an LG G3 ;)

          • Yacine, man you must really hate the fact that I have an android phone. I am curious of your Linux workstation work? Do you have any portfolio work online?

            Ah guessed so.

          • oh man..you are asking about "My" .."linux workstation" work.
            and i was saying to you that "linux is the standard os in major
            VFX studios" including blender foundation if you don't know
            about them...you know...what does "MY work" has to do in this?!?
            can explain to me how on earth you use MAC OSX and your
            phone is android?!? ..a fact is ...YOU are an apple fan...that's
            obvious you even didn't mention linux as an option for "a Workstation use"...and i use Windows 7 and my main software is softimage an now i try to switch to blender.and i don't have any work to show you.as i "don't use linux".. ;=)

          • Simple because you are a troll ;) You probably don't even own your Softimage license, don't really work in that area and just repeat what you read in some magazines.

          • true i'm maybe a troll that talks about facts...
            man just read your posts they would work flawssely
            in apple advertisings.

    • I have a MacBook Pro Early 2011, and Yosemite is very buggy, with graphical glitches like sometimes I will drag an icon on the desktop to a folder in Finder, and the icon gets "stuck" on the screen. I mean stuck. The icon image stays above every image, and will not go away without rebooting.

      Top that off, and my 8GB of memory is always full on a fresh boot, with the only thing running is a graphics switcher. So, yeah, I see his point. I like the features, but they aren't fully baked. This worries me for the next release, if they don't get this one fixed.

      Then, OS X is has been on OpenGL 4.1 for two releases, so for two years no new graphics updates.

      I wonder if they are going to support Vulkan? If they do, I hope Blender decides to, since they are in the faze of updating their underlying system anyway.

  5. Chrome Monkey on

    I thought that the Thunderbolt interface that will make external GPU devices was an Apple exclusive though? I thought that was going to be the next big thing to make installing a GPU less of a chore, and bring the capability to any notebook computer.

    • First, Thunderbolt was never an Apple exclusive, they were simply first to market. It was designed and promoted by Intel.

      Secondly, it is basically a PCI-E bus, so their are adapters for them that do that, but they start at $200, and are limited to an 4x PCI-E adapter, so no Nvidia. Or do they only not work on 4x for SLI. I forget.

      So the capability is their, the prices aren't.

      • Chrome Monkey on

        Okay good, the retail rep was mistaken about the apple exclusivity. Still a mixed bag it appears though, I may have to bring the tower back out of retirement to make it possible to get out of the stone age and start using GPU with Cycles.

  6. It's enough that I have to run windows for autodesk products for school projects(wouldn't use revit by choice that's for sure) I don't want to have to do the same for blender windows is slow and annoying!
    Please keep supporting OS X it's the best OS!

  7. Ammusionist on

    Even though there are many exciting additions on the horizon, I for one really don't have a problem with devoting one or two release cycles now and again to stabilisation. Have a bug-blitz, perhaps offer a month of free Cloud every for original, legitimate bug reported during a specific period? (Just thinking out loud - I realise that may be impractical in many ways)

    Love seeing new features, but occasionally a pure bugfix sprint could be beneficial too!

  8. i just upgraded to Yosemite last week, bad idea, also After Effects have problems with RAM render and previews (and also sound output) , it's a hard decision, programs like Davincy Resolve and Unreal engine push you to keep with latest versions but Adobe target this as an Apple issue. I agree with Jens Verwiebe.

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