2023-11-16 Pipeline, Assets & I/O meeting

Meetings
1

Everyone is welcome on the Google Meet linked below every other Thursday, at 17:00 CET.

Present: Bastien Montagne, Brecht Van Lommel, Charles Wardlaw, Jesse Yurkovich, Matt McLin, Michael B Johnson, Micheal Kowalski, Thomas Dinges

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).

Links

USD

  • 4.1 Release:
    • Micheal K is working on [scene graph] and point instancer (for import only). He is also trying to finish the usdSkel PR.
    • Jesse checks with Kevin if he can work on the old GeometrySet patch soon.
    • Matt is essentially done with the support of the subdiv schema, still has some final details to polish.
  • Potential additional targets for 4.1:
  • Discussion/brainstorming about the ‘Collection I/O’ ideas.
    • Is collection storing I/O settings a good starting point?
      • Especially when it comes to instancing collections (weak feature in Blender currently).
    • How granular to go into supporting editing USD data vs. converting data to Blender format for more complex editing?
    • Idea of ‘virtual library’ for read-only (non-editable) data.
      • LibOverrides to partially edit these
      • Make Local for full power editing.
      • Also related to ‘partial/delayed’ loading of linked data, and support for variants/versions/…
    • More I/O points to connect with external data, e.g. I/O nodes in a GeometryNode tree?
    • Charles will share a design document presenting an alternative idea to ‘Collection I/O’.
    • Jesse will check all existing design tasks related to that idea, and try to merge, summarize, or at least link them all into a single entry point task.
  • Jesse, Michael, Charles will look into updating the USD workboard with all known improvements/added features in the current USD branch.

Other

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on Thursday 30th November, 17:00 CET/Amsterdam time (your local time: 2023-11-30T16:00:00Z).

The provisional meeting agenda will be linked in the #pipeline-assets-io-module channel before the meeting.

3 Likes
2

For the whole USD IO topic and how we can more natively work with USD in the future of Blender, is there a thread or a place to discuss some ideas? Ideas that are not specifically about the IO Collection approach.

3

I would recommend the #USD chat for the time being?

Once we get more clear design ideas, there will be tasks on the tracker too - and most likely some blog post on https://code.blender.org/ too.