2024-10-31 Pipeline, Assets & I/O Meeting

mont29 · October 17, 2024, 4:44pm

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

Present:

The meeting covers the Pipeline & I/O module topics (USD integration, other external fileformats support…).

Links

Jesse notes that Vulkan brings some incompatibility with Hydra rendering currently. This is known by the GPU and Rendering teams, and will be worked on for Blender 4.4.

Scene scaling I/O: still WIP, Charles updated the PR.
Scene instance export: alternative PR, nothing new.
Jesse worked on displacement support for SurfacePreview and MaterialX, there are still some open topics regarding compatibility on the MaterialX side of things.
Jesse merged the export of animated volumes.
Jesse: Working on animated point instancing import.
Jesse: Still working on a design for Mesh Sequence Cache.

Some discussion and questions about the initila design.

When to import (when opening blendfile, on demand, option to reload, load only the hierarchy)?
Consider such data as linked (i.e. not directly editable)?
Do not allow sub-collections to also have collection import. A top-level collection import should have full control over its content.
Do we want to also write these collections data into blendfile? Probably not.
Use liboverrides to allow some level of editing and re-exporting?
USD can split utility data like shaders or armatures into other files, how to handle these?
→ Make reasonable efforts to represent hierarchy within Blender data model, but do not try to mimic all and every complex feature of a format.

The Image I/O ‘sub-module’ will move from ‘Core’ to ‘Pipeline, Assets & I/O’ module.
The Asset ‘sub-module’ will be moved out of the ‘Pipeline & I/O’ module, and be promoted as an actual module.

The next meeting will be on Thursday 14th November, 17:00 CET/Amsterdam time (your local time: 2024-11-14T16:00:00Z).

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