2023-11-27 EEVEE/Viewport Module Meeting

Meetings
1

Practical Info

This is a weekly video chat meeting for planning and discussion of Blender EEVEE/viewport module
development. Any contributor (developer, UI/UX designer, writer, …) working on EEVEE/viewport in
Blender is welcome to join.

For users and other interested parties, we ask to read the meeting notes instead so that the meeting
can remain focused.

  • Google Meet
  • Next Meeting: December 4, 2023, 11:30 AM to 12:00 PM Amsterdam Time (Your local time: 2023-12-04T10:30:00Z → 2023-12-04T11:00:00Z)

Attendees:

  • Jeroen
  • Miguel
  • Michael

EEVEE

  • [#115284 - EEVEE-Next: Disable distant light if world contains absorption - blender - Blender Projects] World light is not included anymore
    when world uses absorbes volume. This resembles more what Cycles does, but will change the look
    of older EEVEE files. Including some of our demo files. The idea is to add a convert world volume
    to object operator to help users to convert older files. This is an user action as it changes how
    the scene is structured and should not be done automatically.
  • Bump mapping implementation introduced in Blender 3.5 can lead to NVIDIA compilation issues where it
    complains to be compiling to much instructions, althought the new implementation has fewer branches.
    More research is needed in order to see what could be the work around.

Metal

  • Shader specializatoin constants and compiler constant tuning.
  • Experiments for optimizing shadow maps for the dynamic shadow maps. Idea is to add a simple depth
    pass which is a transform using mesh shaders, just moving the position and most likely be optimized away.
    This is for now only used by the Metal backend due to the differences between Mesh Shader optimizations
    on other platforms.
  • For larger meshes other experiments are in the making.

OpenGL

Researched issue related to latest released Intel HD Driver. In the final released drivers there
are issues that will crash Blender 4.0 when starting. This is a Windows/Intel driver issue only and
users can work around this issue by downgrading their driver or use Linux. As we don’t have access
to this platform it is unknown to us what the actual driver issue is and how much time a developer
would spent on adding a workaround. The documentation is updated and Blender will notify the user
that the platform is unsupported, without crashing.

Downgrading the driver would also support HD4400 and newer devices to be able to use Blender 4.0.
There is still a discussion going on how long we would be able to support these devices. Especially
with the changes needed for Blender 4.1.

Vulkan

Most time spent on researching an out of resource issue related to command submission and transient
command buffers. The root cause is unclear and also the Vulkan specs are unclear about this point.
The spec mention it as a driver responsibility so the validation layers don’t report any issue.

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