Hi,
I saw the recent YouTube video where it was announced that Blender Linux is now compiled in CentOS. One of the specific things mentioned was that it would make Blender more compatible with the VFX Reference platform. In that area is there a specific revision year that Blender is targeting? Right now it seems to be a mismash of 2018 and 2019 (outside of Python 3.7, which looks like a part of the 2020 draft).
One reason I’m curious is that we’ve had a very difficult time creating a standardized appleseed build that works with all our DCC apps, including Blender. We’re hoping this step might make it a bit easier.
We’re not specifically targeting the VFX reference platform currently. It’s not possible until 2020, since we were using Python 3 long before this platform even existed and downgrading would not have been practical. I would like to match the 2020 platform in 2020, but there’s no official decision on this yet.
Note also there are cases where we can safely use older or newer libraries whose symbols we don’t expose and that don’t affect file writing. For example OpenSubdiv has some serious bugs in 3.3 that affect Blender, so we use 3.4RC2 now. Similarly we are still on OpenVDB 5.x, but the VDB file format did not change so it shouldn’t matter.
If there are symbol conflicts we can normally hide them. We already do this for various libraries, but if you find issues we should be able to fix them.
Hi Brecht,
Thanks for the reply. I’m not 100% sure but I think our issues revolve around the Python libraries. appleseed’s Linux builds have been under CentOS for a while and there was some reluctance to set up a whole new build system with a different set of dependencies just for our Blender plugin.
Yes, but do note that OpenSubdiv is the exception to the rule, generally, we would not switch lib versions so close to release however some high prio bus required it in this case.
