Attendees: Brecht Van Lommel, Clément Foucault, Dalai Felinto, Falk David, Fiona Cohen, Jacques Lucke, Jeroen Bakker, Nathan Veghdal, Sergey Sharybin, Sybren Stüvel, Thomas Dinges
Hair Dynamics (Jacques / Hans)
- Workshop on 7 July in Amsterdam (Jacques visiting).
- Lukas is actively working on consolidating the hair solver into a single node for easier prototyping of the end-user experience (~70% of what was previously implemented as node group is done). (PR)
- Jacques finished the big remaining todos for Bundles and Closures (field support (commit), operator to sync sockets (commit), automatically initialize sockets (representative commit). Can be moved out of experimental soon after the next workshop hopefully.
- Jacques worked a bit more on socket shapes and added regression tests (prerequisite for at least volume grids and lists) (commit). Can be moved out of experimental soon after the next workshop hopefully.
- Also worked on improved socket tooltips to better communicate what the shapes mean, among other things. (PR)
- Hans worked on lists. Got the basics working. Could be merged as an experimental feature soon to simplify iterating on it in main. (PR)
- Next is to get the specific features the Storm project may or may not need.
Viewport (Clément)
- Bug fixing
- Made planning for 5.0, to be published on the module page
- Removed BGL and deprecated python GPU APIs that are not vulkan compatible in 5.0
- Miguel working on performance improvement for 5.0
- GPU team will work on new hair drawing mid-July
Online Assets Library (Sybren)
- Progressing
- Done:
- Adding remote asset library
- Downloading remote asset listing, including support for HTTP gzip compression
- Writing catalog definition file
- Ensuring Blender only reads schema-validated JSON
- Notifying Blender that the download is done
- In the near future:
- Downloading thumbnails
- Downloading actual assets on demand
- Pydantic + OpenAPI code generator landing in main
- Blender UI showing overall download progress + better error reporting
Project Setup (Nathan)
- Almost done with the “add more variables” for path templates (PR):
- Managed discussion about what variables to add, explained what was/wasn’t feasible to add right now, etc.
- Added a couple new variables to the PR by request.
- Revisited some of the variables already added in the PR, making unit tests and ensuring that their semantics and output are well defined.
- The new “node_name” variable required figuring out some semantic questions earlier than I was anticipating.
- Now mainly just working on cleanup and code documentation to prepare for PR review.
- Next week will start on the “Project Awareness and UI” stage of the project.
- Regarding the “Project” part of this:
- After some discussions with some potential users, I think it makes sense to make projects configured via Blender’s Python API. Then the standard user-facing system that most people use will be written in Python, utilizing that API.
- The intent is to both provide a good out-of-box experience that most people use, while still keeping the system flexible enough for more sophisticated studio usage.
- Very open to discussion about this if anyone has thoughts/concerns.
Texture mipmapping (Brecht)
- Have auto generating tx files, replacement of OpenImageIO cache in OSL, rewritten UDIM, tests closer to passing.
- Currently being worked on are shader cancellation (Brecht) and auto differentiation in SVM (Weizhen).
VSE Story tools (Falk)
- There’s a working PR: !140271
- There were multiple bugs at the beginning of the week that have been fixed.
- The workspace pin is still in the ID selector, a bit annoying to change, still WIP.
- Looked at it together with Pablico and tested it with his file. Seems to be working fine. Pablico will try it out next week.
- The pinning design is not ideal when you’re working with multiple VSE editors since you need to change the pinned scene in all of them. Falk will try out an alternative design next week (i.e., the Clip Editor paradigm).
Vulkan (Jeroen)
Blender 4.5
- Fix threading issues that could crash on exit. Resulted in randomly failing linux buildbot gpu tests. The issue was there for 6 months, but this week became apparent (!140650).
- Huge scenes don’t fit within the limitations of Vulkan. OpenGL drivers could use more system ram, but Vulkan drivers have a fixed max amount of memory available. Lowering the texture size works around this issue. Future projects like texture streaming would improve the situation (#140428).
- Using NVIDIA on a system that also has an AMD iGPU can fail to start. We don’t have a system that is able to reproduce the issue. Working with users to check which layers are actually breaking. I expect VK_LAYER_NV_optimus (#140417).
Blender 5.0
- Removal of depth 24 texture formats. These are legacy and not supported by all modern hardware. Removing this texture format also removes the workarounds we implemented in Vulkan and Metal (#140639).
- Experimental HDR support for Wayland/Linux. It is experimental as we didn’t test this on many platforms. Needs community feedback to see if more changes are needed (!133159).
UV Sync (Campbell)
- One remaining bug (subdivided meshes have mixed selection state).
- Ready to send for review.