[Bf-committers] Blender developers meeting notes - 2019-09-02

Mon Sep 2 19:22:04 CEST 2019

Hi all,

Here are the notes from today's developer meeting. Next meeting is
Monday, 9 September 11:00 CEST / 9:00 UTC, in #blender-coders on
blender.chat.

For images read the report on:
https://devtalk.blender.org/t/2-september-2019/9174

Announcements
============
* Julian Eisel is now working full time for Blender in a 4 month contract.
* Nathan Lovato (gdquest) has been granted commit access to contribute
Power Sequencer: video editing tools 3 in the add-ons repository.
* The patches for the sculpt branch are finished, except for the
transform tool. (Pablo Dobarro)
* We started to organize “mentorship” tasks for developers - T69403
and T69399. (Campbell Barton)
* These tasks will be readable by everyone, but writable by the
developers only, as a way to keep the conversation between the
involved parts without too much noise, while keeping our communication
open for the public . (Dalai Felinto)
* Shadow refactor for EEVEE is ready for review. (Clément Foucault)
* We have a landing page and a corresponding tag for all our modules
[2] now. (Dalai Felinto)
* Today is the last day of the Google Summer of Code. Final students
report will be made public soon. (Dalai Felinto)

New Features and Changes
=====================
Sculpt and Retopology
------------------------------
* Sculpt cursor follows the surface normal and displays symmetry.
(Pablo Dobarro)
* Normal radius setting for sculpt tools, to control how sensitive the
sculpt normal direction is to the underlying surface. (Pablo Dobarro)
* World spacing option for brush strokes, to keep an even distance
between stroke points in 3D space. (Pablo Dobarro)
* Poly build tool improvements for retopology. [3] (Pablo Dobarro)
  * Click and drag from a boundary edge extrudes a new quad.
  * Click and drag on vertices tweaks the position.
  * Ctrl + click adds geometry, with geometry preview and automatic
creation of quads.
  * Shift + click deletes mesh elements (faces or vertices).

Rendering
-------------
* Cycles adaptive subdivision and displacement now stitches faces to
avoid cracks between edges. (Mai Lavelle)
* Eevee shader compilation was optimized to only parse the required
shader node code. (Omar Ahmad, Brecht Van Lommel)

Transform
-------------
* When auto merging vertices, adjacent edges and faces can now be
automatically split to avoid overlapping geometry. This is controlled
by the new “Split Edges & Faces” option for Auto Merge. (Germano
Cavalcante)
* Transform parent without children option added. (Campbell Barton)
* Origin edit can now be toggled with ctrl . (Campbell Barton)

Batch Rename
--------------------
Where you could previously rename the active item with F2, you can now
also batch rename all selected items with Alt F2. (Campbell Barton)

* Find & replace, with regular expressions
* Set, prefix or suffix
* Strip characters
* Change capitalization

Other
-------
* Grease Pencil (Antonio Vazquez)
  * Switch active layer automatically when selecting keyframes in the dopesheet.
  * Opacity modifier gained a Strength mode, to use the strength of
the stroke instead of the alpha channel of the material.
* Constraints (Alexander Gavrilov)
  * Copy Scale: option to copy non-uniform scale as uniform.
  * Copy Rotation: option to explicitly specify the Euler order used
during copy.
  * Transform: options to explicitly specify the input and output Euler order.
* Drivers: option to override the Euler order and access quaternion
values for driver variables. (Alexander Gavrilov)
* User Interface:
  * Support joining areas that are not exactly aligned. (Harley Acheson)
  * Various layout improvements for popup dialogs. (Yevgeny Makarov)
  * Outliner alphabetical sorting now uses more natural sorting of
numbers. (Harley Acheson)
  * Workbench matcaps can now be multilayer OpenEXR images with
separate diffuse and specular layers. The layer named diffuse will be
affected by material, texture or random colors, while specular will
not. (Jeroen Bakker)

Projects Under Development
---------------------------------------
* Cycles Optix is almost ready to be merged as an experimental
feature. It’s only waiting to resolve a license issue so it can be
built without having to install the Optix SDK. (Patrick Mours, Brecht
Van Lommel)
* Buildbot is being worked on, to support building official releases
and arbitrary branches. (Brecht Van Lommel)
* Release Cycle page [4] was updated with more details on each Bcon
phase and branching.

Weekly Progress Reports
===================
* Bastien https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Mont29/Foundation/2019#Week_311_-_08.2F24_to_08.2F30
* Brecht https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Brecht/Reports/2019#August_26_-_30
* Clément https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Hypersomniac/Foundation/2019#Week_137_:_26th_-_1st_September
* Dalai https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Dfelinto/Reports/2019#August_26_-_30
* Germano https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Manowii/Reports/2019#Week_9:_26th_-_30th_August
* Jacques https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:JacquesLucke/Reports/2019#Week_48:_August_26_-_30
* Jeroen https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Jbakker/reports/2019#Week_201935:_2019.2F08.2F26_-_2019.2F09.2F01
* Nathan https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:JesterKing/Reports/2019#August_26_-_August_30_.2F_.239
* Pablo https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Pablodp606/Reports/2019
* Philipp https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:PhilippOeser/Foundation/2019#Calendar_Week_35_.28Aug_26th_-_Aug_30th.29
* Sebastian https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Zeddb#Aug_26_-_Aug_30
* Sergey https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Sergey/Foundation/2019#Week_396:_29th_July_-_4th_August

Links
====
[1] - https://developer.blender.org/T68584
[2] - https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Modules
[3] - https://dev-files.blender.org/file/data/gsbkt6d4fdcqpr6kh7d7/PHID-FILE-4froj7nv27z7hduilccc/2019-08-23_17-14-54%281%29.mp4
[4] - https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Process/Release_Cycle

Best regards,
Dalai