[Bf-committers] Blender Developers Meeting Minutes - May 9th

[Jonathan Williamson]

Hey all, here are the meeting minutes from todays developer meeting in #blendercoders on IRC.

1) Current Projects:
 - Viewport Widgets Project is about ready for code review; artists also welcome to test: https://developer.blender.org/T47032
 - Cycles Micropolygon displacement is in development; has Brecht's blessing
 - Blender HMD support is about ready for review, should make 2.78: https://developer.blender.org/T47899
 - Sergey and Hackerman are working on Cycles hair render and depsgraph speedups, documentation coming soon


2) Other Projects:
 - The 2.8 Branch has begun! https://developer.blender.org/diffusion/B/browse/blender2.8/
 - Module teams are encouraged to discuss what legacy features to remove in 2.8 branch, starting to clean the slate for new development
 - Simplified 2.8 keymap progresses slowly; nothing to test yet but Jonathan Williamson will reach out to module members before much longer to test 


3) GSOC:
 - Thomas Dinges worked last week on refactoring Cycles image code, reducing memory usage for smoke/bumpmaps, and added support for rendering HDRs on AMD machines. https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:DingTo/GSoC_2016/Proposal
 
  - Lukas Stockner is finishing up some previous Cycles patches before getting started on his GSOC project: https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Lukasstockner97/GSoC_2016/Proposal 

  Lukas could use sample .blends from artists to test denoising. Contact him on IRC.

  The main patches are decent color management in Cycles ( https://developer.blender.org/D1973 ), and support for energy conversing microfacet models ( https://eheitzresearch.wordpress.com/240-2/ )

  The main thing this enables is more realistic BSDFs. A new Layer model node with glosy coating may also be coming, which will be physically accurate. 

 - Sebastian Barschkis is working on MantaFlow, cherry picking a few things to start, determining what in Blender can stay and what will be handled by the manta script. https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Sebbas/GSoC_2016/Proposal

  - Julian Eisel is working on a detailed design doc for the Layer Manager, which is about ready. He'll review it with his mentor before publishing. The technical design is about done, just needs written down. https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Julianeisel/GSoC-2016/Layer_Manager_Proposal

 - Philipp Gosch is familiarizing himself with the codebase and reading papers. https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:SaphireS/gsoc2016/proposal

  - Other GSOC students are encouraged to join IRC and attend Developer Meetings. Stay engaged! 

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  Next meeting is May 18th at 10am Amsterdam time. Check the meeting time in your timezone at: https://blendercoders.xyz



Cheers,
Jonathan