2024-01-18 Pipeline, Assets & I/O Meeting

Meetings
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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, Jesse Yurkovich, 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

USD

Ongoing development for Blender 4.1 targets

  • Python Hooks import: Micheal did not work on it yet. Since it is expected to be a fairly simple and straightforward change, he may try to squeeze it still for 4.1, if time allows.
  • Import PointInstancer: Micheal did some work on it, and thinks that itā€™s ready for final review and merge.
  • Import UsdGeomPoints as Point Clouds: Current status is unclear, it will most likely be rescheduled for 4.2 now.
  • import of GeometrySet from USD and Alembic: Jesse did some fixes and improvements, there are still some unknowns in this work (USD specs questionsā€¦). Probably safer to reschedule it for 4.2 at this point.

A loose rule was agreed on: if a patch is not (almost) ready by the end of next week (January 26th), it should be rescheduled for Blender 4.2.

As a reminder, Blender 4.1 will move into BCon3 (bug fixes only) on the 7th February.

Micheal asks whether Blender ShapeKeys can have some form of custom normals. USD can store ā€œnormal offsetsā€ into its blend shapes. While Blender ShapeKeys do not store any form of custom normals currently, it could be possible to export the evaluated custom normals for each shape key?

Micheal raises the issue that the switch to Python 3.11 for Blender 4.1 release creates incompatibilities with Nvidia Omniverse work. But Blender follows the VFX platform, so 4.1 should be released with Python 3.11. Other DDCs should most likely also switch to Python 3.11 in the coming months anyway.

Improved Integration of USD in Blender

See also the synthetic task.

USD Reference

Micheal reports that Charles got some basic prototype working, he may demonstrate it at the next 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).

See also the design task.

The pull request is still WIP. Some UI/Operator aspects still need more work.

Some advanced features like ā€˜cascading settingsā€™ for collection hierarchies are not implemented at all, but these are not required for an initial ā€˜testā€™ release of the feature.

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on Thursday 1rst February, 17:00 CET/Amsterdam time (your local time: 2024-02-01T16:00:00Z).

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

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