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: 14 April 2025, 11:30 AM to 12:00 PM Amsterdam Time (Your local time: 2025-04-14T09:30:00Z → 2025-04-14T10:00:00Z)
Attendees
- Clement
- Christoph
- James
- Jeroen
- Miguel
Add-ons
[#137052 - Crash on startup using certain addons that make use of Python GPU shaders - blender - Blender Projects] After removing some deprecated code paths from Blender many issues got reported when add-ons that still uses these code-paths. These code-paths have been deprecated since Blender 3.4 (Dec 2022), however the deprecation warning wasn’t always displayed. These add-ons seems to favor disabling Metal/Vulkan support in stead of implementing ShaderCreateInfo.
The Change that introduced this regression will be reverted. A deprecation warning will be added The idea is to make sure that the add-ons will when using OpenGL GLSL shaders directly. The support for using OpenGL GLSL directly will be removed in Blender 5.0. This will be mentioned in the release notes.
EEVEE
[EEVEE Shadow Terminator Bias - Feedback] Shadow termination issue. Feedback thread has been created, but didn’t got much feedback.
[#137006 - Debug Draw API Overhaul - blender - Blender Projects] Debugging API module is being redesigned to be more usable in other areas as well.
Shader compilation
Making the specialization constants API better. Current implementation OpenGL shader compilation can happen in a critical section. Looking into moving the compilation outside the critical section, however this wasn’t thread safe. Current solution might conflict with on-going work and will wait until the other work is more clear. (Batch compilation)
Batch compilation is currently in 3 PRs. Metal and Vulkan changes will not be included in the initial land. (Metal changes seems straight forward, Vulkan impact hasn’t been investigated)
Vulkan backend
[#136933 - Vulkan/OpenXR: Add support for VK_KHR_external_memory_fd - blender - Blender Projects] Sharing GPU rendering result between Blender and OpenXR for Linux when physical device is shared. GPU resources can only be shared when the GPU device of OpenXR and Blender are identical. A similar solution will be added for Windows as well.
Detected that the D3D11 workaround that we have to support OpenGL on some Windows platforms is also needed for Vulkan. Looking for ways to reduce code-duplication.
[Vulkan: Feedback and testing] Created a feedback thread for the Vulkan backend.