[Bf-committers] Blender Developers Meeting Notes - 2019-08-05

[Nathan Letwory]

Developer meeting 5 August, 2019.

Announcements

 * SIGGRAPH 2019 was a huge success, everyone wants to help
   out (dev fund) and start using Blender
 * Blender 2.80 was the last release where we officially
   support 32 bit Windows and Linux builds. For Blender 2.81
   there will be only 64 bit builds.
   details:
https://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2019-August/050124.html

New Features and Changes

 * Alembic support for import and export of custom
   loop normals. (Sybren Stüvel)
 * Video export support for the Opus audio codec
   and WebM container format. (Sybren Stüvel)
 * Sculpt and paint brushes can now use built-in falloff
   functions rather than a custom curve, for better
   quality results for brushes like grab. (Pablo Dobarro)
 * Cycles: faster multithreaded compilation of many
   shaders. (Lukas Stockner)
 * Materials: new operator for removing unused material
   slots. (Lukas Stockner)
 * Text editor:
   - Layout reorganization of sidebar and menus.
     (William Reynish, Peter Fog)
   - New operator to toggle comment and uncomment,
     shortcut Ctrl /. (Campbell Barton)

 * Animation: new Copy As New Driver context menu option
   to streamline creating drivers that copy the value of
   a different property. (Alexander Gavrilov)
 * Preferences: new option for viewport rotation sensitivity,
   and better behavior for high DPI screens. (Campbell Barton)

Projects

 * NVIDIA contributed an Optix backend for Cycles, to take
   advantage of hardware-accelerated ray tracing in RTX cards.
   The next step is for Cycles developers to review the code.
   Blog post:
https://code.blender.org/2019/07/accelerating-cycles-using-nvidia-rtx/.
   - the review ticket was being used for tech support (how to git and
build):
     please refrain from doing so in the future)
 * Features from sculpt branch are being submitted and reviewed one by one
 * Sequencer prefetching patch is updated

For Developers

 * There is a new developer CMake configuration, which enables options
   for faster builds, error checks and tests. We recommended developers to
use this.
   https://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2019-August/050125.html
 * Windows builds now have "Just My Code" stepping by default in debug
builds.
   This is for C++ code (Ray Molenkamp)

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/announcing-jmc-stepping-in-visual-studio/
 * As a reminder a slight change in release stabilizing branch
   is in the planning for 2.81. This is still quite a few weeks out.
   A proposal will be submitted in the coming few weeks for that. (Nathan
Letwory)

Weekly Reports

 * Bastien
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Mont29/Foundation/2019#Week_307_-_07.2F27_to_08.2F02
 * Brecht
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Brecht/Reports/2019#July_29_-_August_2
 * Campbell
https://download.blender.org/ftp/ideasman42/donelist/2019.html#week-337-july-29
 * Clément https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Hypersomniac/Foundation/2019
 * Germano
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Manowii/Reports/2019#Week_5:_29th_July_-_2nd_August
 * Jacques
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:JacquesLucke/Reports/2019#Week_44:_July_29_-_02
 * Jeroen https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Jbakker/reports/2019
 * Nathan
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:JesterKing/Reports/2019#July_29_-_August_9
 * Sebastian https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Zeddb#Jul_29_-_Aug_02
 * Sergey
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Sergey/Foundation/2019#Week_396:_29th_July_-_4th_August
 * Sybren
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Sybren/Reports/2019#July_29_-_Aug_4

Next meeting will be on 2019-08-12, 09:00 UTC.