2023-03-21 Nodes & Physics module meeting

Meetings
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The meeting will be open for anyone interested in joining the video call (link below).

Meeting time: 15:00-16 CET (Your local time: 2023-03-21T14:00:00Z)

Links

Present

  • Hans Goudey
  • Iliya Katueshenock
  • Jacques Lucke
  • Lukas Tönne
  • Simon Thommes

Since the Last Meeting

  • Erik finished and committed the first milestone of the SDF volume implementation plan (commit).
  • Hans continued working on general mesh performance improvements.
    • Leaving edit mode (commit, commit) and copying UV maps for rendering (commit) are now parallelized.
    • Mesh bounds are now set before they have to be calculated for some mesh primitives, as part of a general plan for pre-calculating some cached mesh data (commit).
    • The mesh shade smooth attribute is now stored generically as sharp_face, part of the ongoing mesh data refactors (commit).
    • Face corners are stored as two generic attributes internally, lowering memory usage of many operations (commit).
  • The built in hair node group assets now have copyright and license information (commit).
  • Jacques continued working on core performance improvements to copy-on-write and index masks.
  • Lukas continued to prototype a simulation-based comb brush implementation.
  • The team made more progress on the simulation branch, changing some internals, improving the simulation zone drawing, and writing design tasks about cache resetting and the simulation cache file format.

General Discussion

  • Simon mentioned that he often sees people overwhelmed by large trees when using the hair node group assets. They often have the impression that they are supposed to edit the node groups when it’s expected that they should use the modifier interface or high level node groups instead.
    • An option to lock node trees (on by default for appended assets) might be useful as a way to hint to users what they’re supposed to do.
    • Jacques agreed that locking would be useful, and points out that it would be a helpful way to avoid mistakes from the “Append and Reuse” behavior too.
  • Iliya said he often finds examples of groups that would be helpful as node group assets, and wondered if more assets could be added.
    • Jacques explained that given the limited resources and potential to bloat Blender, we have to be careful about going overboard with adding assets, especially given the upcoming extensions platform planning.
    • Hans mentioned that it’s best if assets can be added in a cohesive group (like the hair groups) rather than in a more scattered/random way.
  • Hans asked for confirmation that retrieving the active camera object and retrieving camera data should be separate nodes. Those present agreed that allows for more flexibility and makes each node clearer.
    • Hans will make a design task for a node to retrieve camera data from a camera object.

Pull Requests

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on Tuesday April 4, 15:00-16 CET (Your local time: 2023-04-04T13:00:00Z ), which is 2 weeks from this meeting. The provisional meeting agenda will be linked in the #nodes-physics-module channel before the meeting.

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