2025-05-09 Projects Update

Attendees: Clément Foucault, Dalai Felinto, Jacques Lucke, Jeroen Bakker, Nathan Veghdal, Sergey Sharybin, Sybren Stüvel

Projects

  • Hair Dynamics (Jacques / Hans)
    • Blog post on declarative design.
    • Usability improvements for bundles and closures
    • Hans si working on implementing Node Socket Shapes Design and has a PR ready
    • Embedded assets:
      • Jacques had a meeting meeting with Bastien last week
      • There is a TODO list of things to tackle
      • Need an icon and UI polish

NPR (Clément)

  • The design for the NPR in Blender has been chosen
  • Clément will work on splitting it into individual design tasks for various features and will make a block post.
  • Viewport
    • Clément worked on a lot of refactoring and bug fixing
    • Worked on a regex-based source preprocessor to allow using more modern syntax.
    • There is now documentation of what is supported by the shadersource preprocessor.
    • There are also tests!
    • Swizzling support for the BLI vectors
    • Miguel is working on the mac part of the shader compilation backend.
    • Next step: make shader specialization non-blocking.
    • Clément made a change to minimize the amount of specializations, but it did not bring as much of a speedup as it was anticipated.

Online Assets Library (Sybren)

  • HTTP downloader is ready for review.
  • The original monolithic milestone was deferred in favour of a solution that is half:
    • Handle the download of the index.
    • Use (lack of) thumbnails to indicate if assets are downloaded.
    • Focus on operators to download assets or catalogs.

Project Setup (Nathan)

  • Path templates LANDED! (missing release notes).
  • Documentation PR for the user manual
  • Next: report error in the UI (missing variables i.e.).
  • Next->Next: More variables (scene name, camera name, …).
  • Interesting idea: access Python expressions.

VSE Story tools (Falk)

  • Biggest UI challenge: duplication of settings (resolution, color management, …)
  • Falk walked through the prototype with Hjalti (the most hardcore VSE user at the studio) and he was super excited.
  • Next: green-light the per-camera aspect ratio and file settings design and start with some of the technical targets.

Vulkan (Jeroen)

  • Vulkan backend isn’t experimental anymore and most time has been spent on fixing bugs.
  • Recently more issues are related to how strict Vulkan is compared to OpenGL. There are several issues that will take some days to fix and they are being addressed:
    • 2 driver-related issues have been reported.
    • Compositor seems to have some sync issues (might be NVIDIA only).
    • Making the backend more robust when allocating large buffers on low end devices.
  • Last feature that is not there yet is USD/Hydra.
    • There are some changes that are done upstream that need to be included into our build.
    • We already tested that USD/Hydra works with those changes, so it is just waiting and ask people to push buttons along the way.
  • Short term goals
    • Fix bugs. I expect more inflow of bugs when Blender 4.5 becomes beta.
    • Spent more time on Qualcomm support.
    • Blender 5.0 features (HDR support + optimizations)

UV Sync (Campbell)

  • Lots of progress, wondering about making UV Sync also default for old files (do-versioning).
    • Better not to disturb old files, but removing the feature altogether is still on the picture.
    • It would be interesting to know if there are still use cases for UV Sync off.
  • Most of the issues from the original report by Daniel Bystedt are already tackled in the branch.
  • There is still a lot of work to get more operators to sync the selection.
18 Likes

Awsome to see “UV Sync as default” is coming and working! Thank you for the hard work!
I think it’s more like how it should work anytime than one of the useful behaviors, so I believe we can even delete Sync button itself on Blender 5.0 or later. I have never want to have UV “un-sync” in any other software.

10 Likes

This all sounds incredibly exciting! And I’m particularly looking forward to the development of the NPR implementation. It’s been mentioned here that the design has been chosen but is there info on what exactly this means?
Will the proposed prototype branch that you could try out be the design that will be used going forward or is it a different internal design that’s been chosen?

2 Likes

There will be more details about this soon (on a code.blender.org post). As soon as we have any updates on this it will be shared on the NPR thread.

2 Likes