This is the place to take notes for on-going Pipeline, Assets & I/O meetings, before moving them to Meetings - Developer Forum . Please keep it as a clean, ready-to-use template for the next meeting.
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, Micheal Kowalski
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
- Google Meet
- Previous meeting
- Next meeting
- Pipeline, Assets & I/O project
- Core project
- #pipeline-assets-io-module chat channel
- #core-module chat channel
- #USD
USD
Ongoing development for Blender 4.1 targets
- Armature and shape key animation export to UsdSkel is ready for final review, Jesse and Bastien will handle it.
- The Scenegraph Instancing first review is done, Jesse will finish it. Meeting agrees that there should be no need for a fake user on created Collections.
- UsdGeomPoints to point cloud import seems to be in a good state, but needs to be checked on again.
- PointInstancer import looks still promising, it may still be ready for BCon2.
- The status of the Alembic/USD geometry sets import is still unclear, due to technical issues with the current status of the new Curves data, and the fact that they are not renderable. Ideally would be rendered natively, rather than converting them to meshes. Brecht thinks that native rendering of Curves could be added later in the release cycle (this is closer to a bug fix than a new feature), so the patch may be in a fairly good state already.
- USD Import python hooks are likely to be delayed to after BCon2, could still make it at this point though, since it’s a relatively straight forward extension of existing import hooks.
- The Optional authoring of subdivision schema on export is almost ready to be merged.
- The handling of unspecified texture color space on USD Preview Surface import has been merged.
As a reminder, BCon2 has been rescheduled to 3rd January, in three weeks.
Improved Integration of USD in Blender
Jesse created a synthetic task to keep track and organized future design work on the topic, based on the outlines presented by Brecht, as agreed on the previous meeting.
Collection Export
This is about the basic support of export settings per collection, available for any external format (not the more advanced topics discussed in the previous meetings, specific to USD).
Brecht and Bastien had a meeting on Monday with Jesse, which lead to a first good outline of technical and user-level design. Jesse has also been busy looking at existing codebase, to update the design task.
Other
Jesse is working with Guillermo Venegas on the drag and drop feature. The new file handler (for import operators only, currently) and support for multiple file paths have been merged in Main already. The next pull request, to enable using file handlers in drag and drop, is already being worked on.
Brecht notes that more improvements are possible for the file handler:
- There could finally be a single I/O operator, which takes care of calling the right operator for each format, using the registered file handlers.
- This could also help unifying some I/O settings/behaviors (Orientation? Multiple files support?).
- The ‘Collection Export’ project will also need the support of export operators in the file handlers.
Jesse and Brecht will check with Guillermo if he’s interested in working further on this topic.
Next Meeting
The next meeting will be on Thursday 4th January, 17:00 CET/Amsterdam time (your local time: 2024-01-04T16:00:00Z).
The provisional meeting agenda will be linked in the #pipeline-assets-io-module channel before the meeting.