[Bf-committers] Blender developers meeting notes - 2019-08-19

Mon Aug 19 19:47:46 CEST 2019

Hi all,

Here are the notes from today's developer meeting. Next meeting is
Monday, 26 August 10:00 CEST / 10:00 UTC, in #blender-coders on
blender.chat.

Announcements
=============
* 2.81 release dates and new branch system proposed on bf-committers
[1] (Nathan Letwory)
  * Meeting agrees on waiting a few more days for feedback before a
firm decision.
  * The Python API need more details - we may need to separate APIs to
mark them with different stabilities.
  * We also need to update the Release Cycle [2] web page.
  * We still need a more specific rule if we are to reinforce code
review as part of our coding practice. Someone is yet to come up with
a proposal for that.

* Damien Picard has been added to add-on developers to update
"animation_animall". He worked with  rigify and published addons at
[3] (Campbell Barton).

Summer of Code
=============
* OpenXR (virtual reality) project will be sent to review this week
(Julian Eisel).
* Cycles Nodes project is being merged one feature at a time.
* Bevel and Embree projects were submitted for code review.
* Outliner was merged (see below).

New Features and Changes
======================
Outliner
-----------
The Summer of Code project for the outliner is now master, bringing
many improvements. (Nathan Craddock, Campbell Barton)

* Selection is now synced between the 3D viewport and outliner by
default, in both directions.
* Walk navigation with up and down keys.
* Expand and collapse with left and right keys, hold shift to apply recursively.
* Box select with click and drag.
* Range selection with shift click, extend selection with ctrl click.
* Expand arrow click and drag to expand or collapse multiple.
* Sub elements shown as icon row can now be selected.
* Object selection with eyedropper now works in the outliner.
* Filter option to show invisible objects.
* F2 to rename active outliner element.
* Parent drag and drop for multiple objects.
* Icons for constraints, vertex groups and sequencer.

Rendering
--------------
* New shaders for Cycles and Eevee (Omar Ahmad)
  * Map Range node to linearly remap a value from one range to another.
  * Clamp node to clamp value between minimum and maximum.
  * The Math node now shows only a single socket for operations that
use a single input.
* EEVEE (Clément Foucault)
  * Transparent BSDF improvements [4] to support blending exactly the
same as Cycles, with both additive and multiplicative blending.
Additive and Multiply material blending modes were removed since they
can now be set up through just shaders.
  * Holdout node support
* Viewport: geometry batch caching for the GPU has been multithreaded.
This is a step towards better performance for editing and animation
playback of high poly meshes. (Clément Foucault)
* Compositor: a new Denoise node was added in the compositor, to
denoise renders using OpenImageDenoise [5]. It needs Albedo and Normal
passes, which Cycles can render by enabling Denoising Data passes.
(Stefan Werner, Brecht Van Lommel)

Sculpting
------------
* Voxel Remesh: a new operator was added to quickly create a new quad
mesh based on the volume of the mesh. It is particularly useful for
sculpting, to generate a good topology when blocking shapes, as an
alternative to dynamic topology without the performance cost of
continuous updates. It is available in the mesh properties and in
sculpt mode. (Pablo Dobarro)
* Sculpt: better performance for grab, rotate and thumb tools,
particularly on Linux. (Pablo Dobarro)

Other
-------
* Custom Properties: full support for editing int and float arrays in
the user interface, and creating color properties. (Alexander
Gavrilov)
* Python API: new "mathutils.geometry.delaunay_2d_cdt()" for
Constrained Delaunay Triangulation. (Howard Trickey)
* Windows Installer: from 2.81 on, it will be possible to installer
multiple Blender versions side by side. (Ray Molenkamp)
* UI: click on status bar report message now opens window with Info
editor (_Valentin_)

Projects
======
* Particle Nodes has an updated proposal for its user interface [6]
(Jacques Lucke).
* New library landing in master are too error prone at the moment. We
need the procedure to be documented well, to avoid what just happened
with OpenImageDenoise. (Ray Molenkamp)
* The sculpting brush cursor patch is ready for review [7]. (Pablo Dobarro)
* Priority this week is to review sculpt and Cycles patches. Anyone is
welcome to help out with code review. (Brecht Van Lommel)
* Quadriflow library build is done and will be in "extern" as
previously agreed on. (Sebastian Parborg)

For Developers
============
* User Manual: the version in svn trunk has been bumped to 2.81, and
new features can be documented there now.
* Python is no longer compressed in an archive in the precompiled
libraries. This makes Blender rebuilds faster, and lets `make format`
work without needing a separate Python install.

Weekly reports
===========
* Bastien https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Mont29/Foundation/2019#Week_309_-_08.2F10_to_08.2F16
* Brecht https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Brecht/Reports/2019#August_12_-_16
* Campbell https://download.blender.org/ftp/ideasman42/donelist/2019.html#week-339-august-12
* Dalai https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Dfelinto/Reports/2019#August_12_-_16
* Germano https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Manowii/Reports/2019#Week_7:_12th_-_16th_August
* Jacques https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:JacquesLucke/Reports/2019#Week_46:_August_12_-_16
* Nathan https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:JesterKing/Reports/2019#August_12_-_August_16_.2F_.237
* Philipp https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:PhilippOeser/Foundation/2019#Calendar_Week_33_.28Aug_11th_-_Aug_15th.29
* Sebastian https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Zeddb#Aug_12_-_Aug_16
* Sybren https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Sybren/Reports/2019#Aug_12_-_18

Links
====
[1] https://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2019-August/050153.html
[2] https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Process/Release_Cycle
[3] https://github.com/LesFeesSpeciales
[4] https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.81/Eevee#Transparent_BSDF
[5] https://openimagedenoise.github.io/
[6] https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Source/Nodes/UpdatedParticleNodesUI2
[7] https://developer.blender.org/D3594

Best regards,
Dalai