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: 6 April 2025, 11:30 AM to 12:00 PM Amsterdam Time (Your local time: 2025-04-06T09:30:00Z → 2025-04-06T10:00:00Z)
Attendees
- Clement
- Christoph
- James
- Jeroen
- Miguel
Current issues
There are 3 high prio issues for 4.4 release. Mostly related to overlay. One might require other drawing order and could slip to 4.5 as it could lead to other issues and requires more testing. Some fixes needs to be backported manually.
[#136738 - WIP: Overlay: New Grid Drawing - blender - Blender Projects] Depth aware grid is in development, but will change visually and might need to be a 5.0 target.
Shadow acne/terminator solution is in development. Needs more iterations to check all different situations.
[#136607 - Fix #132196: UI: Camera gizmo cannot be shifted on Intel GPUs - blender - Blender Projects] There is an issue on Intel/Windows related to selecting Gizmos. We went over the fix and it seems fine to land as is.
Shader compiler
GPU materials/passes and converging all backends to use the same base class. Cancelling compilation passes. Needs testing on AMD and Apple devices. Handling the handles are done in the base class. Compilation is only done in the specific backend class.
Vulkan (and Metal) performs a backend compilation when creating a pipeline. This is done in the application thread and can still stall. Some GPU drivers take more time than others. There are ideas how to solve it by adding pipeline configurations to shader create info. These pipeline configurations will be compiled right after the front end compilation step. This idea still need to be implemented.
Vulkan backend
[#133718 - Vulkan: OpenXR - blender - Blender Projects] Initial patch for OpenXR support has landed. The current implementation is slow as the actual goal implementation uses parts of the Vulkan spec that are not well covered by examples and tutorials, making it hard to known the exact steps to take. Currently the result are downloaded to the CPU and re-uploaded to OpenXR. Eventually VK_KHR_external_memory and related extensions will be used.
[#133717 - Vulkan: USD/Hydra - blender - Blender Projects] We got a first USD/Hydra library with Vulkan support enabled. However when using this library it will fail and it seems like the GPU capabilities aren’t initialized correctly. To investigate this we need debug libraries.
[#136259 - Vulkan: Swapchain synchronization - blender - Blender Projects] Last week we enabled GPU synchronization for swap chains. This means that Blender application thread doesn’t need to wait for the swap chain to be finished in order to prepare the next frame. It has lead to issues on some platforms where there is a lag visible. These are being fixed.