Attendees: Clément Foucault, Dalai Felinto, Jacques Lucke, Jeroen Bakker, Nathan Veghdal, Sergey Sharybin, Sybren Stüvel
Projects
- Hair Dynamics
- NPR
- Online Assets Library
- Project Setup
- VSE Story Tools
- Vulkan
- UV Sync
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, …)
- There is a design proposal for moving them to a “file level”.
- 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.