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Blender developers meeting notes - March 19, 2017

4

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

Ton Roosendaal writes:

1) Targets for the next release

  • The planning and target list.
  • Dalai Felinto suggests to bring some of the 2.8 DNA changes into 2.79 for forward compatibility. This especially related to the new layer system.
  • Sergey Sharybin: Cycles Shadow Catcher waits final check from Lukas Stockner. All feedback addressed now. Prem Nirved looks into OpenCL Split kernel support for Shadow Catcher.
  • Reminder to ALWAYS have the (release log) wiki docs ready before merging in master!
  • GPU notes for Cycles in 2.79:
    • This will likely be the last one supporting NVidia GTX 5xx cards (and older).
    • AMD OpenCL: older cards (GCN 1) won't work after all the optimizations. Note: this year GCN 5 gets released.

2) Blender 2.8 projects

  • Dalai has a patch for using IDProperties for collections.
  • A viewport project plan update goes to code.blender.org this week.
    Same goes for workflow and '101'.
  • UPBGE team is stand by to help getting the GE work in 2.8. This work can only start when viewport project is more mature and defined. We stay tuned.

3) Other projects

  • Monday students can start submitting for GSoC 17! We have about 15 potential mentor candidates who review proposals. Let me know if you want to help reviewing and mentor.

Laters,

-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.

4 Comments

  1. Chrome Monkey on

    In preparation for the viewport refactor, I have worked on some independent benchmarking tests. The results surprised me. While it is possible for a single mesh to have well over 50,000 faces and not slow down at all, individual objects have a much higher viewport cost. Consider the humble empty. Just 4000 of these starts to create choppy movement in the viewport, and 8000 starts to slow things down to a crawl. This is with the 3D Viewport as the only window. The outliner and other windows are closed. It also makes no difference whether the empties are in the camera view frustum. Only hiding the layer brings viewport performance back. I'm astonished. The baggage that a simple empty carries must be quite hefty, with location, rotation, scale, and a handful of properties in the Object panel and the Constraints panel. I'm not coder enough to even guess where a refactor and optimize should even begin.

  2. Seriously? GTX580 to this day is one of all-around fastest rendering cards (I have three). In the last project rendering times of a GTX580 were roughly 3/4 of a GTX1080. I even looked up where to get more of used 580s. A bizarre move to retire those.

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