[Bf-committers] Blender developers meeting notes - 2019-06-03

[Brecht Van Lommel]

Hi all,

Here are the notes from today's developer meeting. Next meeting is
Monday, 10 June 18:00 CEST / 16:00 UTC, in #blender-coders on
blender.chat.

1) Development

* Summer of Code coding started this week. Follow development in the
summer of code forum. Daily Windows builds of all the branches are
available, though it's still very early.
https://devtalk.blender.org/c/blender/summer-of-code
https://blender.community/c/graphicall/
* Work started on updating the manual, but we're not quite ready to
get all developers involved in this yet. So it's postponed to next
week, when we should have a clear tasks list and guidelines, and the
major reorganizations of chapters are in place.
* COLLADA support has been improved in 2.80 but could use more
testing. Leave any feedback on this forum topic.
https://devtalk.blender.org/t/testing-collada-for-blender-2-80/7693

2) New Features and Changes

There were a few user interface improvements.

* Gizmos now activate on drag after a small distance, which allows
clicking to select items behind gizmos. There are now separate drag
thresholds for mouses and pen tablets. (Campbell Barton)
* Navigation gizmos are now available in the image, clip and sequencer
editors. (Campbell Barton)
* Continuous grab can now work only in the X or Y direction for
operators that only. This makes dragging the playhead in the timeline
more predictable. ( George Vogiatzis)
* Stats info shows only unique evaluated geometry now, to give a more
accurate indication of memory and processing cost on the CPU and GPU.
(Dalai Felinto).
* Walk mode now uses the status bar keymap display for shortcuts.
(Dalai Felinto)

The focus continues to be on bugfixing. Some of the bigger fixes were:

* macOS viewport performance is much improved on certain graphics card
that had lagging issues. To solve this we had to make macOS 10.11 the
minimum version that Blender can run on, though we already only
officially supported 10.12 and up. (Tomoaki Kawada, Brecht Van Lommel)
* Cycles memory usage for instances is now back to what it was in
2.79. This optimization was moved into the core dependency graph,
which means Eevee benefits as well. (Sergey Sharybin)
* Cycles denoising has been improved to avoid halos around bright
edges. (Lukas Stockner)
* Snapping now works on curve objects with modifiers. (Germano Cavalcante)
* Texture painting performance on Windows with many cores is much
improved, fixing an old threading bottleneck. (Bastien Montagne)

3) Weekly Reports

* Bastien: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Mont29/Foundation/2019#Week_298_-_05.2F25_to_05.2F31
* Brecht: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Brecht/Reports/2019#May_27_-_31
* Campbell: https://download.blender.org/ftp/ideasman42/donelist/2019.html#week-328-may-27
* Clément: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Hypersomniac/Foundation/2019#Week_124_:_27th_-_3rd_June
* Dalai: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Dfelinto/Reports/2019#May_27_-_31
* Jacques: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:JacquesLucke/Reports/2019#Week_35:_May_27_-_31
* Jeroen: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Jbakker/reports/2019#Week_201922:_2019.2F05.2F27_-_2019.2F06.2F02
* Philipp: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:PhilippOeser/Foundation/2019#Calendar_Week_22_.2810hrs.29
* Sergey: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Sergey/Foundation/2019#Week_387:_20th_-_26th_May