2023-12-11 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 18, 2023, 11:30 AM to 12:00 PM Amsterdam Time (Your local time: 2023-12-18T10:30:00Z → 2023-12-18T11:00:00Z)

Attendees:

  • Brecht
  • Clement
  • Jeroen
  • Miguel
  • Michael

EEVEE

  • [#115465 - EEVEE: Lookdev HDRI Spheres - blender - Blender Projects] Lookdev spheres have been ported to EEVEE-Next. The new implementation also includes shadow and light evaluation direct and baked light on the spheres. The spheres are positioned on the near plane of the viewport/camera.
  • Several optimizations
    • Optimized the Deferred shading to use tile based approach.
    • Optimized and simplified the ray-tracing pipeline. Calulating the setup of the horizon
      scan one time and reuse it in multiple passes.
  • Stabilizing and bug fixing in the horizon scan pipeline (light leaking), switching render engines could use incorrect shaders.
  • Workaround for atomic texture operations to cover older Metal platforms.

Focus in the next period is fixing bugs, regression testing and performance.

Shader builder

  • [#115929 - CMake: Fix Compiling Shader Builder on macOS - blender - Blender Projects] Shader builder is a tool used by EEVEE/Viewport developers to check if changes made to shaders doesn’t break other shaders. It does this by compiling all ‘static’ shaders. Due to recent changes in the build environment shader builder didn’t compile anymore on macOS and Linux. The faulty change has been identified and rolled back.
  • [#115888 - GPU: Shader Builder Filter - blender - Blender Projects] Shader builder could be more useful when it selects other work flows as well. Especially when adding features to the GPU backend you would like to filter on what it exactly validates. An --gpu-backend and --gpu-shader-filter argument was added to support these workflow. Without these arguments developers would make local changes to the source code what needed to be cleaned up afterwards.
  • Eventually the goal is to run shader builder on the buildbot so changes will also be validated on platforms where the change isn’t developed on. This still requires more testing to see on which platforms this can be enabled and for which backends.
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