2024-09-09 Viewport/EEVEE Module Meeting

Meetings
1

Practical Info

This is a weekly video chat meeting for planning and discussion of Blender Viewport/EEVEE module development. Any contributor (developer, UI/UX designer, writer, …) working on Viewport/EEVEE 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: 16 September 2023, 11:30 AM to 12:00 PM Amsterdam Time (Your local time: 2024-09-16T09:30:00Z → 2024-09-16T10:00:00Z)

Attendees

  • Clement
  • James
  • Jeroen
  • Miguel

EEVEE

Overlay/Selection

Metal

  • Apple is working on OpenSubDiv support. This is an proof of concept and its goal is to figure out what needs to be done. The solution will not land directly in Blender main as there are other projects and developments that needs to be aligned.

NPR

  • NPR pass has been rewritten from a screen space pass to a geometry pass
  • All changes are in a branch [#127258 - NPR-Prototype: Initial implementation - blender - Blender Projects]. It is still early in development as it focuses on the technical decisions that needs to be made. These technical decision first needs to be agreed upon, before we can start on implementing user focused features.
  • During the meeting there was a discussion about how geometry attributes are currently handled. This seems to be in line with what is expected. Geometry attributes are merged before drawing and access to the attributes are indexed using a name hash which is consistent.

Vulkan

Preparing vulkan to be part of Blender 4.3 release. The backend will still be experimental. See release notes for more details.

In the preferences user can select it preferred backend. When blender starts it tries to detect if that backend can be used (GPU supports our minimum feature-set). If that fails Blender will fall-back to its default backend and show a dialog with the error. In the console detailed information is logged about what feature could not be found.

There seems to be an issue with Intel iGPU support on Intel driver 30/31 which is being investigated. These driver don’t support VK_EXT_dynamic_rendering_unused_attachments which we use to emulate subpass transitions. We might need to look for a different solution here.

19 Likes
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Hello! I wanted to ask if the fixes for the current regressions of EEVEE with ShadertoRGB and reflection planes are being tackled for 4.3?

These are quite important regressions that left numerous workflows, especially with NPR, unachievable with 4.2.
Also, is it planned to decrease the compiling time? EEVEE even after the first LTS release still feels very slow compared to before.

Great news btw for the NPR branch, can’t wait to test what it will bring!

Thank you for your hard work!

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Developments have not yet started, but should start soon. Priorities of development can look different due to our release process. For a new release we focus early on larger or more technical complex developments. Later in the release cycle we focus more on the “smaller” features, modifications and bug fixes. This can sometimes look counter productive.

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I am planning to work on some EEVEE fixes for 4.3. But some of the one listed here needs more time unfortunately. It will depends on how things turns out and what we prioritize.

But I would say compilation time is quite high in our list before additional features.

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Thanks for the info!