Blender developers meeting notes – May 9, 2016
Quite a full meeting this week. I’m quite excited by the HMD (Head Mounted Device) support for VR devices – can’t wait to try my hand on modeling in VR :)
Jonathan Williamson writes:
Hey all, here are the meeting minutes from todays developer meeting in #blendercoders on IRC.
1) Current Projects
- Viewport Widgets Project is about ready for code review; artists also welcome to test.
- Cycles Micropolygon displacement is in development; has Brecht's blessing.
- Blender HMD support is about ready for review, should make 2.78.
- Sergey and Hackerman are working on Cycles hair render and depsgraph speedups, documentation coming soon.
2) Other Projects
- The 2.8 Branch has begun!
- Module teams are encouraged to discuss what legacy features to remove in 2.8 branch, starting to clean the slate for new development.
- Simplified 2.8 keymap progresses slowly; nothing to test yet but Jonathan Williamson will reach out to module members before much longer to test
3) GSOC
- Thomas Dinges worked last week on refactoring Cycles image code, reducing memory usage for smoke/bumpmaps, and added support for rendering HDRs on AMD machines.
- Lukas Stockner is finishing up some previous Cycles patches before getting started on his GSOC project. Lukas could use sample .blends from artists to test denoising. Contact him on IRC. The main patches are decent color management in Cycles, and support for energy conversing microfacet models. The main thing this enables is more realistic BSDFs. A new Layer model node with glosy coating may also be coming, which will be physically accurate.
- Sebastian Barschkis is working on MantaFlow, cherry picking a few things to start, determining what in Blender can stay and what will be handled by the manta script.
- Julian Eisel is working on a detailed design doc for the Layer Manager, which is about ready. He'll review it with his mentor before publishing. The technical design is about done, just needs written down.
- Philipp Gosch is familiarizing himself with the codebase and reading papers.
- Other GSOC students are encouraged to join IRC and attend Developer Meetings. Stay engaged!
Next meeting is May 18th at 10am Amsterdam time. Check the meeting time in your timezone at: https://blendercoders.xyz
How far is now ALEMBIC?
WhuUuuaa!? NB FLIP is going to be implemented in Blender’s fluid sim? That’s pretty cool – I think the algorithm has only been published for a few months, right? Could Blender be the first “commercial” 3D package to have it?
Houdini has Flip fluids for some time. It’s been published now but it is not that “new”.
And we’re talking about the narrow band, right?
Although I did read the proposal a little closer and saw he mentions NB is already in the Mantaflow API,
I am excited about almost every single item on that list. Good job, devs!
Thorough meeting notes, thanks Johnathan
Can’t wait for Lukas Stockner’s Cycles Denoising; it will make technical animations so much faster. And Thomas Dinges’ memory refactoring will give me a great reason to upgrade my home PC’s ancient GPU…
Yeah I am so looking forward to this as well for both technical animation + interior design renderings.
This is great news and I´d love to test the widgets branch. Unfortunbately I am new to building blender myself. I managed to build master but I cant figure out, how to clone the sources of a branch.
git clone https://developer.blender.org/diffusion/B/repository/wiggly-widgets/
gives an error. And I can´t find any “wiggly-thingy” on this list:
https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-blender/branches/
So please could anyone tell me what to do?
The actual error you received would be helpful.
But, if you just want a recent build of an experimental feature branch without compiling it yourself, check http://www.graphicall.org .
This was the error:
fatal: unable to access ‘https://developer.blender.org/diffusion/B/repository/wiggly-widgets/’: The requested URL returned error: 403
well yes, I could go with precompiled librarys but that doesnt help me with learning how to do it myself ;)
The link you used is a http web page. Try cloning the main Blender repo instead with
git clone git://git.blender.org/blender.git
which I got from that webpage, and then checking out the wiggly-widgets branch.
Well, it´s quite funny how you´re telling me WHAT I want to do but not HOW ;)
Don´t get me wrong here I appreciate your efforts to help me but cloning that repository is what I did to build blender main in the first place.
I just can´t figure out how to checkout a branch. At the end it´s just that I don´t know what to type to do this;)
It´s just confusing, given you´re doing the Wiki Step-by-Step and than are supposed to know why you did type in those comands or how to alter them to do something else.
You see it´s a general misconception in this kind of “tutorials” that there are to much preasumptions of the readers knowledge. If I where a knowing git-user it might be enough for me to know a certain file path. Yet this not the case.
I might eventually sort this thing out and do a “dumbed down” tutorial about this because I think I am not the only one struggling with this kind of stuff.