Blender developers meeting notes - July 17th 2016

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

1) Planning for next release

• Proposal: target on end of August for the 2.78 RC. Planning and release targets were updated here in wiki.
• Brecht van Lommel will check status of Microdisplacement with Mai Lavelle. It is still a candidate but it's tight.
• We need at least one more member for the Windows and OS X platform build team.
• Grease Pencil 2: Antonio Vazquez says it's all ready for review.
  Joshua Leung is available for review. He's not sure if everything would be ready for a release, maybe the patch has to be split in parts. GP2 Code is here.
• Antonio will make a doc and a patch diff this week.
  Call for GP fans: please help him. Good docs increase the chance it goes to 2.78 a lot. Docs would go here.
• Kevin Dietrich is wrapping up Alembic, Campbell will do reviews.

2) Blender 2.8 project and other future projects

• Ton Roosendaal announces that AMD agreed on sponsoring Blender for two projects; one is for supporting Mike Erwin's work on Viewport and upgrading Viewport, another one is an internal project to hook up Blender with their new ProRender engine. More will be announced next week at SIGGRAPH. More sponsors are likely underway too.
• After SIGGRAPH we then can check on if or how we'd do a final crowd fund raiser.
• Proposal: aim at wrapping up master plans and designs for 2.8 in September.
• Once the team for 2.8 gets filled in, we should organise sprints or workshops for the core developers on 2.8. Have them meet a week to hammer down all the issues and freeze the design specs. This could either be a bigger sprint or a number of smaller sprints based on sub-projects
  (Workflow/UI/tools, Physics/particles/modifiers/nodes, Viewport, etc). Could be part of funding campaign.

3) GSoC

• Nothing notable that needed decisions or actions. Subscribe to the SOC list to follow progress.

Thanks,

-Ton-