Practical Info
This is a weekly video chat meeting for planning and discussion of Blender Eevee/viewport module development. Any contributor (developer, UI/UX designer, writer, …) working on Eevee/viewport in Blender is welcome to join.
For users and other interested parties, we ask to read the meeting notes instead so that the meeting can remain focused.
- Google Meet
- Next Meeting: September 12, 2022, 11:30 AM to 12:00 PM Amsterdam Time (Your local time: 2022-09-12T09:30:00Z → 2022-09-12T10:00:00Z)
Attendees:
- Michael Parkin-White
- Omar Emara
- Clément Foucault
- Jeroen Bakker
- Dalai Felinto
Draw manager
- Refactor of draw manager has been reviewed and landed in master. Note that this is just an initial commit and needs more work.
- EEVEE-Next was hooked up to the new draw manager.
Blender 3.3 LTS/Support
- Time was spent on fixing high prio bugs and review due to the upcoming release.
- There was an issue reported by Simon for Project Heist open movie. We are not able to reproduce it. Jeroen will check with Simon and to identify the issue.
- We looked into the AMD 22.7/22.8 issues. It isn’t clear if the issues are inside the driver or inside Blender. This week we want to continue looking into the root cause of these issues.
EEVEE-Next
- Upcoming week development continues on the shadows.
- Cryptomatte render layers for EEVEE-Next is in review. Blender Archive - developer.blender.org
Metal Backend
- Metal shaders have been approved and landed into master. Metal index buffers landed into master. Vertex buffers are approved, but might still not be available in master.
- Preparing the next patch Metal immediate mode. To actually test the patch a dummy shader will be introduced to test during development.
- High level patch will be discussed where to switch to geometric shaders alternative.
- Patch landed that allows more textures to be used in materials on M1 or Apple with AMD GPU. This won’t change the behavior when using Intel.
Vulkan Backend
- Internal status report has been discussed with Ton about the current state, reasoning and challenges of using Vulkan inside Blender. See Blender Vulkan - Status report for the report. We hope we can find developers interested in participating on this project.
Viewport compositing
- Some fixes and cleanups have been done.
- Next nodes would be Fast Gaussian and Glare.
Longer term planning
- Currently we have 3 bigger projects running that are related to each other.
- Viewport compositing and needs Metal backend to run on Apple devices as both projects rely on compute shaders that aren’t supported on Apple/OpenGL.
- EEVEE-Next needs viewport compositing for the Bloom effect.
- Due to these reason they will be released at the same time. We don’t expect EEVEE-Next and Metal backend to be ready for Blender 3.4
- Viewport compositor could be an experimental feature in Blender 3.4 on supported platforms.