2024-04-25 Pipeline, Assets & I/O Meeting

Meetings
1

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

Present: Bastien Montagne, Brecht Van Lommel, Jesse Yurkovich

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

Targets for Blender 4.2

  • Import UsdGeomPoints as Point Clouds: Micheal created a new PR based on the previous one, review is in progress.
  • The support for Alembic/USD geometry sets import has been merged (!115623).
  • The status of the other targets is unclear currently, they do not even have a task or PR linked. The simpler ones could still make it into 4.2 if ready in time, but several are very likely to be rescheduled for 4.3.

Improved Integration of USD in Blender

See also the synthetic task.

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 has been merged.

There are still two points that could use some work before 4.2 release:

  • Linked collections in ViewLayer have collection export settings visible and active. Suggestion is to hide them, and never use a linked collection as ‘trigger’ for export (i.e. only export linked collections when they are part of the hierarchy of a local ‘export-enabled’ collection).
  • All necessary exporters released with Blender have been updated to be compatible with the collection export feature, but some could still use some UI unifying work (make them use panels instead of boxes).

Proposal to mark Collada I/O code as legacy

The OpenCollada library has had poor maintenance/upgrades in the past years, and starts becoming incompatible with recent versions of its dependencies.

Furthermore, its integration in Blender has also been fairly inactive for years now. It would also need a large amount of refactoring to match the modern I/O architecture in Blender, as followed by other built-in formats (OBJ, USD, etc.).

Proposal is to mark it as legacy in both Blender UI, and the documentation (manual and release notes).

It could then be fully removed in a future release (e.g. the next LTS, 4.5, or the next main version switch, 5.0).

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on Thursday 9th May, 17:00 CEST/Amsterdam time (your local time: 2024-05-09T15:00:00Z).

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

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