Attendees
- Brecht Van Lommel (Blender)
- Kévin Dietrich (Blender)
- Jeroen Bakker (Blender)
- Patrick Mours (NVIDIA)
- Stefan Werner (Tangent)
- Max Dmitrichenko (Intel)
Notes
Cycles
- Intel OpenCL: still blocked by Brecht making regression tests work with OpenCL to validate this is working correctly. Hopefully will be working soon. Afterwards it’s also planned to get this testing running automated for Blender builds.
- AMD driver update: a new driver was released which has been confirmed to fix issues with Radeon RX 5000 series cards, as well as volume rendering on other cards. There still appears to be an issue with baking. We need to go through the many reports about this and assess exactly which bugs are still valid.
- Standalone repository: Stefan asked about when this is updated and who does it. Currently Brecht updates it after every Blender release. It would be helpful to document this, and also have more clear tagging and version numbers indicating a correspondence to Blender releases.
- Optix CPU + GPU rendering: Patrick wants to start working on this. Will need support for building multiple BVHs so both Optix and Embree BVHs can be built at the same time. This should also benefit other GPU devices. Lukas was also going to look into this, Patrick checks with him to avoid duplicate work.
Eevee & Viewport
- The workboard was updated to show the plans for 2.92.
- For Eevee, the plans are to work on AOVs, Cryptomatte, and depth of field.
- For the Vulkan port, the rough schedule has been pushed back one release. This is to make time for improving the Python GPU module to be a more complete replacement for BGL, which has to be deprecated and will stop working once Vulkan is used. The Python GPU module is the current focus of the Vulkan project. Brecht mentions that this will need an organized effort to gather feedback from add-on developers, to ensure the API is complete enough.
Point Clouds
- The geometry nodes project is planning to expose the point cloud object type in Blender 2.92. For this we need renderers to also support rendering it.
- For Cycles, Brecht already planned to work on this for 2.92.
- For Eevee, there is already some support but each point is rendered as a low res sphere, which doesn’t look great. Brecht would like to have a brainstorm session with Clément and Jeroen about improving this, perhaps fake rounded normals without accurate Z depth in the fragment shader is better in practice? To be discussed.
Practical Info
This is a weekly video chat meeting for planning and discussion of Blender rendering development. Any contributor (developer, UI/UX designer, writer, …) working on rendering in Blender is welcome to join and add proposed items to the agenda.
For users and other interested parties, we ask to read the meeting notes instead so that the meeting can remain focused.
- Agenda
- Google Meet
- Time: Tuesday 2 to 3 PM Amsterdam Time