Attendees
- Brecht Van Lommel (Blender)
- Thomas Dinges (Blender)
- Kevin Dietrich (Blender)
- Lukas Stockner (Blender)
- Patrick Mours (NVIDIA)
- Christophe Hery (Facebook)
- Olivier Maury (Facebook)
- Brian Savery (AMD)
- Stefan Werner (Intel)
- Xavier Hallade (Intel)
- Sebastian Herholz (Intel)
Notes
3.2 Release
- MNEE: Brecht will commit the patch this week. Olivier is still looking into some improvements and Metal support is disabled, but this should not block things.
- Light Groups: Lukas is reviewing, Brecht will help where needed, still planned to be committed for 3.2.
- AMD HIP: Brian mentions ROCm 5.1 driver for Linux is planned to be released this week. Brecht will then update buildbot with the latest compiler version and we can enable it. AMD Vega cards were enabled on Windows, but it’s still failing for some scenes/cards, Brian investigates. The AMD HIP Windows SDK also needs to be updated, potentially this may solve some issues.
- Color Management: there was a new ACES configuration released from the OpenColorIO project, which is aimed to be a more user friendly and light version that can work well for apps like Blender. Brecht is working on various changes to ensure Blender works well with this configuration.
Cycles Development
- Sebastian announced the Intel Open Path Guiding Library, and his work to integrate this into Cycles. A patch to integrate this into Cycles will become public later, it’s still under development. The first version would be CPU only, but GPU support is planned. First priority is to improve handling of more complex BSDFs with multiple lobes.
- Stefan presented the Intel OneAPI backend, aimed at new discrete Intel GPUs. It was mainly developed by Nikita Sirgienko. Ideally this could be integrated in Blender 3.2 to go along with hardware releases, but the deadline is very tight, so this is unclear still.
- Patrick contributed a Hydra Render Delegate, that allows Cycles to be integrated into other applications such as Omniverse, usdview and Houdini. However note that this is not currently an officially supported feature. The build process is currently quite rough and any help making it easier is welcome. In particular each application uses different library versions, and Cycles should be compiled with compatible versions.
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
- Google Calendar Event
- Next Meeting: April 12, 2022, 5 to 6 PM Amsterdam Time (Your local time: 2022-04-12T15:00:00Z → 2022-04-12T16:00:00Z)