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: May 13, 2023, 11:30 AM to 12:00 PM Amsterdam Time (Your local time: 2024-05-13T09:30:00Z → 2024-05-13T10:00:00Z)
EEVEE
- PCF shadow offset is now done automatic. We might want to add a shadow terminator bias in the future. There are some regressions when using PCF shadows on lower resolutions. Cause might be that the filtering is done on world space. Will be investigated.
- Punctual shadow map at projection discontinuity has been worked on. The fix removes the need of the custom shadow frustum. This removes padding and can increase the shadow resolution and reduce light leaking.
- World sun light extraction has being worked on as recent changes to the spherical harmonics require it. There is a working PR, but it doesn’t cast shadows as that requires more of the shadow pipeline on the GPU. We expect this should be enough for the initial release.
- Improvement on shader compilation times. Some experiments have been done.
- NVIDIA specific extension doesn’t give good results as the compilation times are all over the space.
- Another approach is to use separate process. the compilation is much faster, but when implemented in Blender it was not that fast. Perhaps due to the overhead of Blender.
- Another extension blocked the main thread which isn’t useful for us.
- Finally we tested a new API for compiling shaders in batches. where shaders will be stored as a handle. Shaders are compiled in the main context. The API will progress when a selection of the shaders takes to long, this way the UI is still updated. There are still some technicalities to solve.
- [#121137 - Draw: Add default material fallback detection - blender - Blender Projects] Shader pipelines that are the same as the default are not being compiled anymore. The default pipeline is being used instead.