Blender Developer Meeting Notes: December 9, 2019

jesterKing writes:

Announcements

• Blender 2.81a is out.
• Dalai Felinto moved to Amsterdam to work fulltime in Blender.

Blender 2.82

• bcon2 this week (12/12).
• Cycles will get custom AOVs and light groups in time.
• UDIM depends on Lukas Stockner availability for current reported issues, and upcoming reports after the merge.
• Draw manager overlay refactor is finished.
• Grease Pencil refactor won’t be in 2.82. But the idea is to break things at once only. So any disruptive bugfix is currently addressed in their working branch (greasepencil-refactor).
• Weld modifier needs a final review, may make in time for bcon2 (no patch yet).
• Sergey Sharybin will review mantaflow and USD patch/design this week.
• Animation team roadmap lacks a high priority task in their page, besides “Stacked mode for F-curves in Graph editor” . It is not clear if that means no big features for 2.82. Dalai Felinto will check with Sybren Stüvel.
• LANPR needs review on its drawing part, and won’t likely be in time for bcon2 either.
• Virtual Reality (first milestone) won’t be finished in time for bcon2.
• Hans Goudey may have another bevel patch by bcon2, but he cannot guarantee it.

Others

• Nathan Letwory is working on documentation for onboarding and to improve the release process (based on the 2.81 release). Feedback is welcome. The initial feedback in the meeting was that although onboarding is important, review process should take precedence over that since getting new developers started is not our bottleneck.
• Dalai Felinto is working on the details for the “Tracker Curfew” initiative. Basically the idea, based on Ton Roosendaal’s proposal, is to sanitize our bug tracker situation. Ultimately we will have most of the hired developers to help handling (closing / moving to a TODO list / fixing?) the 2k or so open bugs we have, while dedicated triagers can be sure the new stream of bugs don’t add up to that.

Changes / New Features

• Shader nodes for Cycles and Eevee have been extended.
  • Map Range node now has interpolation modes: linear, stepped linear, smoothstep, smootherstep. ( Charlie Jolly )
  • Math node has new operations: trunc, snap, wrap, compare, pingpong, sign, radians, degrees, cosh, sinh, tanh, exp, smoothmin and inversesqrt. ( Charlie Jolly )
  • Noise and Wave texture nodes distortion was improved to distort uniformly in all directions, instead of diagonally. This change is not strictly backwards compatible, the resulting pattern is a little different. ( Bartosz Moniewski )
• User Interface
  • Custom Face Orientation Colors ( Harley Acheson )
  • File Browser Volumes and System Lists Icons ( Harley Acheson )
  • Disk to disc icon dat file rename ( Harley Acheson )
  • Rename “Toggle …” back to “Show Markers” ( Alessio Monti di Sopra )
  • Add tooltips for modifiers ( Sybren A. Stüvel )
  • Support Copy To Selected and Alt-Click for PropertyGroup members. ( Alexander Gavrilov )
• Tool System:
  • Only use toolbar draw-style for buttons with icons ( Campbell Barton )
  • Experimental fallback tool support ( Campbell Barton )
  • Gizmo: Add optional background alpha for 2D button gizmo ( Campbell Barton )
  • Gizmo: add view aligned gizmo for shear ( Campbell Barton )
• Industry Compat Keymap:
  • Support tool cycling for all tool shortcuts ( William Reynish )
  • Use consistent shortcuts for sculpt mode masking ( William Reynish )
  • Support scroll wheel zooming also while Alt is held ( William Reynish )
  • Support 1-4 keys for switching selection modes in the UV Editor ( William Reynish )
• Others:
  • Grease Pencil: Add Opacity y Onion switch to Dopesheet ( Antonio Vazquez )
  • Add cloth pressure vertex group and unlock cloth shrink values range ( Sebastian Parborg )
  • Add the ability to create internal springs to the cloth sim ( Sebastian Parborg )
  • Cycles: Add OptiX acceleration structure compaction ( Patrick Mours )
  • glTF: upgrade Draco to version 1.3.5 and add mesh skinning support ( Jim Eckerlein )
  • Make curve decimation only take into account the selected curve points ( Sebastian Parborg )
  • Overlay engine: refactor ( Clément Foucault )
  • Draw Manager: Bounding Box Drawing ( Jeroen Bakker )

Weekly Progress Reports

• Campbell Barton
• Clément Foucault
• Germano Cavalcante
• Jacques Lucke
• Jeroen Bakker
• Julian Eisel
• Nathan Letwory
• Pablo Dobarro
• Philipp Oeser
• Sebastián Barschkis
• Sebastian Parborg
• Sergey Sharybin
• Sybren Stüvel