[Bf-committers] Developer irc meeting minutes, 16 Jan 2011

[Tamito KAJIYAMA]

Hi Ton and all,

> - Ton notices Tamito Kajuyama nicely keeps his Non-Photo-Realistic  
> render branch (FreeStyle) upto date with the 2.5 trunk. Testers and  
> reviewers welcome!
> http://projects.blender.org/scm/viewvc.php/branches/soc-2008-mxcurioni/?root=bf-blender

Thank you Ton for bringing people's attention to the Freestyle branch.
It is my great pleasure to see that the Freestyle integration work is
recognized in this way.  

I take this opportunity to report the current status of the Freestyle
integration project in response to the following message from Ton on
6th of January:

> During the next months the branch devs can report here on how stable  
> migrations are, to make a planning that doesn't break 2.6 immediately,  
> but do this in smaller steps and releases.


*** Freestyle integration status report January 2011 ***

In December 2009, we defined a list of things that should be finished
before the merge into the trunk is asked [1].  This to-do list included
fixes of stability issues, recovery of missing features, and additions
of a few new functionalities.

Among these things, a strong emphasis was first put on addressing
the stability issues.  Most critical bugs were fixed in the first two
months after the definition of the to-do list.  These fixes addressed
(a) a long-standing source of various instability issues related to
2D-to-3D inverse projection transformation [2, 3], (b) crash due to
objects behind the camera [4], and (c) fatal instability related to the
orthographic camera [4].  Problem reports from branch users also
helped the consolidation of the branch a lot.  As a result, the stability
of the renderer has been substantially improved.

After these stability improvements were made, the development
moved on to the recovery of missing features, including (a) transparent
strokes [5], (b) image-space density and Z depth information [5],
(c) full-sample anti-aliasing [6], and (d) border rendering [7].

Some documentation work was also done to migrate the Freestyle
API reference manual into the new Sphinx-based documentation
system for Blender 2.5 [8].

Having most of the initial to-do items addressed, we refined the list
of final targets in June 2010 based on users' requests and available
human resources.  Less important missing features were dropped
from the list, while a key element was included.  The updated to-do
list [9] consists of three items:

1. An artist-friendly GUI for interactive manipulation of line style parameters
2. Feature edge detection at the intersection of two faces
3. Completion of Freestyle Python API improvements

The new GUI aims to provide artists with an intuitive and easy-to-use
line stylization toolset.  To start with, several GUI design approaches
were discussed [9], and GUI designs of commercial NPR software
were reviewed [10].  The basic framework for Freestyle in Blender
has been implemented as documented in [11].  The GUI is functional
and ready for tests by users.

As of this report, subjective achievement rates of the three to-do items
are 40%, 0%, and 80%, respectively.  Taking the amount of unfinished
work and available resources into account, the completion of all the
to-do items is unlikely to happen earlier than the next summer.

As cited above, updates on the development work have been posted
to the Freestyle integration blog:

http://freestyleintegration.wordpress.com/

The Freestyle branch has been kept in sync with the trunk code base
by regularly merging changes from the trunk.  Branch users have been
actively exchanging techniques, application ideas, and rendering results
through the Freestyle thread in BlenderArtists.org:

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=89986

Thanks to volunteer builders, up-to-date Freestyle builds are available at:

http://www.graphicall.org/

Those who are interested in the reported new elements of Freestyle are
highly encouraged to test and review this branch.


January 17, 2011
KAJIYAMA, Tamito (T.K.)


[1] http://freestyleintegration.wordpress.com/2009/12/21/new-to-do-list/

[2] http://freestyleintegration.wordpress.com/2010/01/10/weekly-update-december-28-january-10/

[3] http://freestyleintegration.wordpress.com/2010/01/18/weekly-update-january-11-17/

[4] http://freestyleintegration.wordpress.com/2010/02/01/weekly-update-january-25-31/

[5] http://freestyleintegration.wordpress.com/2010/02/17/weekly-update-february-8-16/

[6] http://freestyleintegration.wordpress.com/2010/03/29/weekly-update-march-15-28/

[7] http://freestyleintegration.wordpress.com/2010/04/07/weekly-update-march-29-april-4/

[8] http://freestyleintegration.wordpress.com/2010/04/18/weekly-update-april-5-18/

[9] http://freestyleintegration.wordpress.com/2010/06/07/weekly-update-may-24-june-6/

[10] http://freestyleintegration.wordpress.com/2010/06/27/weekly-update-june-7-27/

[11] http://freestyleintegration.wordpress.com/2010/08/11/weekly-update-july-12-august-11/

-- 
KAJIYAMA, Tamito <rd6t-kjym at asahi-net.or.jp>


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ton Roosendaal" <ton at blender.org>
To: "bf-blender developers" <bf-committers at blender.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 16, 2011 4:29 PM
Subject: [Bf-committers] Developer irc meeting minutes, 16 Jan 2011


> Hi all,
> 
> 1) 2.5 project
> 
> - Tracker went up to 67, enough work todo still!
> 
> - Sergey announced that his "crazyspace" work to allow sculpting  
> armature-deformed meshes is ready for final reviews. He'll get it  
> reviewed first by Brecht, and then either commits or posts in tracker  
> for further feedback.
> 
> - COLLADA: Ton had a concerned mail from COLLADA lead Remi Arnaud, he  
> and Khronos offer their support, they also would love to see Blender  
> to soon get the official Khronos Conformancy Badge! Nathan Letwory is  
> in contact with Remi to check on what can be done together.
> 
> - Campbell mentions that all core IO scripts from 2.4 now are ported  
> to 2.5. They work similar or better (x3d) even now. Campbell offers to  
> make a test suite for Import/Export with default reference .blend files.
> 
> - Nathan will post a diagram with the current state (support level,  
> features) of our Import/Export scripts.
> 
> 2) Other projects, branches
> 
> - Lukas Toenne updated his blog about his particle node work: http://phonybone.planetblender.org/
> 
> - That post, and Jeroen's proposal for OpenCL could be copied to our  
> code blog too! Ton will set this going.
> 
> - This week we'll also check which of the tablet work from Mike Erwin  
> can go to trunk.
> 
> - Ton notices Tamito Kajuyama nicely keeps his Non-Photo-Realistic  
> render branch (FreeStyle) upto date with the 2.5 trunk. Testers and  
> reviewers welcome!
> http://projects.blender.org/scm/viewvc.php/branches/soc-2008-mxcurioni/?root=bf-blender
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> -Ton-