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).
Michael has been testing and experimenting with the dynamicly linked USD libraries in the branch.
Library changes are likely to land in master very soon, Brian has been working on polishing support for these.
Brian is also working on finalizing the Hydra scene delegate on Blender side. This is still a target for Blender 3.5.
Charles has been working on a CI patch, Sybren will finalize the review next week.
Brecht raises the topic of how to handle the IO options and meta-data handling.
IO operators
drag and drop
Collection IO
geometry nodes (import nodes)
Asset system (assets from non-blend files).
An abstraction layer is needed to extend and make current operators code more flexible and easy to use in various contexts. Brecht will write some key ideas down in a design task.
Next Meeting
Bastien will not be available in December to host the module meetings. So the next meeting will likely be on Thursday 12th January, 17:00 CET/Amsterdam time (your local time: 2023-01-12T16:00:00Z).
The provisional meeting agenda will be linked in the #pipeline-assets-io-module channel before the meeting.
A question I don’t see that you have treated in the meet.
There is a patch by @KevinDietrich regarding Alembic import features that includes efficient import of arbitrary attributes, something that is basic for interop with other softwares, not just houdini, and that patch has been laying around and evolving since 3 or 4 blender version, I think it exists since 3.0.
When will this patch be merged? because AFAIK it’s ready to be merged, but my impression is that it’s constantly being delayed because of small details being reviewed, I may be totally wrong and they are very important details, but it is my impression that are details that can be improved over time with the patch already present in the next blender release, I mean 3.5 of course.
Let me stress out that it is a very important patch for interop and fx.
Could be interesting to know the point of view from @sybren and @KevinDietrich because it seems they are doing small adjustments, so they may have a more precise idea on the possible future status of this.
It’s a pity to not have it already because we face some hard limits with alembic not being able to import arbitrary attributes to work with GN
This patch and the one for geometry set support now depend on other patches to be sorted out first. For attributes, there is the open question of error reporting which is causing tests to fail.
