Check the overview thread for more information about the meeting.
Present
- Dalai Felinto
- Iliya Katueshenock
- Jacques Lucke
- Hans Goudey
- Simon Thommes
Since the Last Meeting
- The team continued polishing simulation features for 3.6.
- Lukas added a “Calculate to Frame” operator to make it faster to see the result of simulation input changes.
- The simulation bake path is now exposed in the modifier interface and editable.
- Hans finished adding subframe mixing for better motion blur support.
- Caching is now optional to better support realtime use cases.
- Jacques made the behavior when skipping frames during playback more intuitive.
- The visualization in the timeline was also improved with a toggle, and a theme option for the cache color.
- Erik continued adding features to the experimental volume nodes changes, including a Sample Volume node to find voxel values at certain positions, and an input node for the default SDF grid.
- Some performance improvements landed in the past few weeks as well.
- Jacques finished the
Indexmask
refactor, changing the main type used to encode selections during operations to be multithreaded and use at least 4 times less memory. - Some topology map computation can now be skipped in the extrude node, especially when there are no edge attributes.
- Jacques finished the
- Bevel weights are now a generic attribute that can be adjusted in geometry nodes.
- New contributor Aliaksandr Sharstniou tweaked the Separate Components node output order to match the spreadsheet.
- Some legacy behavior related to instances in the Realize Instances and Mesh Boolean nodes was removed.
Topics
- Dalai is working on a “Tool, Gizmos and checkpoints” code.blender.org post about the last design workshop. It will be published soon.
- Lukas’ investigation into Embree for BVH performance.
- Having Embree as the only BVH solution is not doable in terms of platform support.
- Embree is specialized for ray-casting, need to make sure it’s also an improvement for other use cases like nearest searches.
- Jacques made a design task about storing materials in the simulation state. There are tradeoffs either way, it needs more discussion.
- There are a few remaining tasks to polish simulations, but other than that, the simulation framework itself is basically finished:
- Estimating how much memory is used by the cache
- Putting volumes in the simulation state
Geometry Nodes 4.0 Targets
- Custom normals
- Reading and writing custom normals in geometry nodes. Associated with more breaking refactors that have to be in 4.0.
- Legacy instancing replacement (#105321)
- Internally this is an important change for further performance improvements with instances.
- The proposal’s design should be clearer, and we need to make sure this isn’t a regression in usability.
- There would be two assets: one for backward compatibility, and another for users to use moving forward.
- Node Operators
- The branch with simple behavior (and now inputs) is basically finished, that should be committed soon.
- Usability (time-boxed)
- Sub-panels in modifier UI
- Parity with built-in and asset nodes: Menu Switch (enum sockets)
- It wasn’t clear if this will fit into the available time yet.
- Redo panel for node operators
- The ability to add inputs to node operators will be handled separately from the initial commit.
- Serial loops
- Realtime mode (time-boxed)
- Use-case: mode to iterate/design over simulations
- Modifier context setup tool
- Standalone node tool
- Checkpoint
- Freeze node
- Import bake
- UI overview/operators
- Editing bakes
- Physic nodes
- Collision, …
- This will wait until Project Gold physics use cases become clear
- Rotation socket
This week
- Node operators (Hans)
- Workshop blog-post (Dalai)
- Grease Pencil layer design integration (Dalai)
- Subpanel design proposal (Jacques)
- Realtime mode proposal (Jacques)
- Look at modifier subpanel (and polling) (Lukas)
Postponed
- Particles Preset + corresponding simulation nodes assets
- Gizmo nodes
- Usability
- Dynamic Socket Type
- Dynamic Socket Count
- Other possible targets
- Closure Socket
- Geometry Object
- Lists
Pull Requests
- None discussed in this meeting