2022-03-24 Pipeline, Assets & I/O Meeting

Meetings
1

Everyone is welcome on the Google Meet linked below every other Thursday, at 17:00 CET.

Present: Bastien Montagne, Michael Kowalski, Sybren Stüvel

The meeting covers the pipeline & I/O module in a broader sense, including some topics hosted in other modules (e.g. some I/O python add-ons, or overrides and .blend file I/O from the Core module).

Links

USD

Libraries

  • Dynamic linking is on hold (too many technical problems). Requirements may also need some better definition.
  • Adding the imaging library is also problematic.
  • In general USD code is currently not easily buildable with modern compilers and libraries (like TBB), handling this requires already quite some efforts and makes working on supporting new USD features even more complicated.

Meeting agrees that it’s best to first tackle the support of current feature set in the library update. Adding new features will therefore be put on hold for now.

USD material ‘plugin’ system

Various IO formats store their material/shader data separately, using dedicated formats. E.g. USD or Alembic could both store shaders in the MDL format.

Michael will create a design task to investigate on how add-ons could feature different encoders/decoders for various materials format, in a generic way.

Other Topics

Overrides

Bastien reports that the development got delayed a bit, yet the new Outliner’s Override Properties view is now in master.

The Hierarchy view and the ‘System Overrides’ changes should land next week, drastically reducing the amount of exposed information (by default), and the possibilities for users to unwillingly break override hierarchies.

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on Thursday 07th April, 17:00 CEST/Amsterdam time (your local time: 2022-04-07T15:00:00Z).

The provisional meeting agenda will be linked in the #pipeline-assets-io-module channel before the meeting.

5 Likes