Everyone is welcome on the Google Meet linked below every other Thursday, at 17:00 CEST.
Present: Bastien Montagne, Iyad Ahmed, Julian Eisel, Michael Kowalski, Sonny Campbell, Soslan Guchmazov, Sybren Stüvel, Zhen Dai
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
- Google Meet
- Previous meeting
- Next meeting
- Pipeline, Assets & I/O workboard
- Core workboard
- #pipeline-assets-io-module chat channel
- #core-module chat channel
Flamenco
Sybren announces that Flamenco 3 is now in use for the production of Heist at Blender studio. It’s in test phase currently with only a few workers, will grow up in coming weeks.
Some work has also been done on implementing remainings ‘must have’ features, e.g. the ability for workers to report the last render result to the manager, etc.
It is now very close to being fully production ready for the studio.
USD
Micheal has done some investigation and bug fixes, was mostly working on other projects recently but should be able to dedicate more time to Blender now.
The ‘IO collection’ topic is brought up again, participants agree that we need a meeting to start brainstorming a design for this. one thing to keep in mind is that this should not be USD-centric though, but Blender-centric, and potentially usable by several formats.
Zhen asks about potential future for integration of USD in Blender, whether current approach (fully converting USD data into Blender data, without keeping any reference to original USD data) or less destructive one (partial import of ‘what is needed’ from USD data into Blender data, while keeping track of the USD scene organization). Consensus is that we need both, the second one will take a lot of time to be fully implemented though.
Overrides
Bastien notes that in the past two weeks there has been another design iteration over usability/UI/UX aspects of the project. One of the main goal is to simplify the options exposed to the user (mainly through menu entries), and make behavior consistent across the whole Blender.
Julian also made many small improvements on the UI in Outliner.
Asset Browser
The Unity people have started submitted patches to fix issues in the Asset area, some where already reviewed and merged into master by Julian, great to see them contributing already!
Julian also notes that some proposed changes in relation with the Grease Pencil workflow are still in discussion, they are fairly unlikely to make it into Blender 3.3 at this point.
Other Topics
Alembic: Sybren has been reviewing patches from Kevin Dietrich (among others, adding support for arbitrary attributes). Still hope to get those in Blender 3.3.
STL: Iyad thinks the importer is in good shape, feature complete. The exporter is still todo.
Suslan has just started working on I/O code for HxA.
Next Meeting
The next meeting will be on Thursday 14th July, 17:00 CEST/Amsterdam time (your local time: 2022-07-14T15:00:00Z).
The provisional meeting agenda will be linked in the #pipeline-assets-io-module channel before the meeting.