[Bf-committers] Blender 2.8 planning notes: 2017-05-15

[Dalai Felinto]

Hi, meeting notes for today's Blender 2.8 planning.

Last week reports and original ideas for this week
====================================

* Luca: last week was spent on bringing hair to draw manager,
integrating it with the clay engine and coding a new specular shader
for it. Still need other particle visualizations.

* Sergey: did little work due to Agent327 and 2.79 regression fixes,
and bad merges. Will try to get depsgraph started and coordinate
tracker triaging. And will at least look at edit mode crash with
blender internal. If it’s not a simple fix just disable edit mode in
this case.

* Bastien: didn’t have a full week. wants to tackle 2.79 bug trackers
and get envelope bones. Stick bones will be easy after that. After
2.79 to get planning to resume pending projects such as asset
management and static overrides.

* Campbell: (weekly report [link]) Apart from sculpt engine and VBO
optimizations spent too much time troubleshooting bugs in draw
manager. Gawain is a bit of a bottleneck when it comes to (silent)
errors debugging. Most of the draw manager tasks can be tackled as
ongoing development. But we will make sure to report known issues.

* Clément: worked on Eevee fixes and screen effects (motion blur,
depth of field, tone mapping), helped with sculpt (matcaps working
there), and looked at performance. VBO size was reduced as much as
possible.

* Dalai: (weekly report [link]): Documents (wiki, draw manager
possibilities), multi-view single camera fixes, arrays for override
rna settings and some eevee reviews. Still want to work on tackle
render_to_image, render_to_view.

Discussion about performance optimizations
================================

The ultimate goal of Blender 2.8 viewport performance is to allow for
smooth playback. Static drawing of the scene is not the priority and
it will benefit from animation improvements anyways.

Some open topics for optimization

* Don’t generated data that is not required (e.g., tangent)
* VBO partial updates
* Uniform/constant parameters for Eevee shaders
* Batch generation threaded (the populate loop in draw manager)
* Persistent mapping in gawain [1]
* Re-use buffers instead of destroy and re-create them

Next Week
========

Prior to the meeting everyone will have at least a paragraph with
last’s week’s work. Or when possible a complete weekly report.

* Bastien: Workspace wrap ups (transform space and
linkable/appendable) and merge. Envelope bones for draw manager and
bug tracker.

* Campbell: Draw manager - refine draw manager, fix glitches, resolve
old GL calls and some optimizations.

* Clément: Eevee and draw manager optimization. Will talk with Sergey
about his ideas for reusing buffers (as oppose to destroy and recreate
them). Also, draft UI and usability proposal for probes.

* Dalai: finish integration of draw manager with rendering and batch
rendering. Remove old drawing pipeline that is not required for
Blender internal (in other words, remove the former “Modern Viewport”
code).

* Luca: Non-hair particle visualization modes and matcap shading for
the diffuse hair shader.

* Sergey: Depsgraph, master bug triaging and fixing and look at edit
mode crash on 2.8 with Blender Internal.

As always, other developers are welcome to join the tasks. Draw
manager main task still has a few tasks up for grabs [2].

[1] - https://developer.blender.org/D2670
[2] - https://developer.blender.org/T51202

Regards,
Dalai
--
blendernetwork.org/dalai-felinto
www.dalaifelinto.com