[Bf-committers] Blender developers meeting notes - 2019-05-20

[Brecht Van Lommel]

Hi all,

Here are the notes from today's developer meeting. Next meeting is
Monday, 27 May 18:00 CEST / 16:00 UTC, in #blender-coders on
blender.chat.

1) Development

* For developers, the user interface and Python API will be frozen at
the end of today. We will wait two days before making it official in
case serious issues come up. There are a few exceptions that might
still change:
** UV editing toolbar and gizmos improvements.
** Adding back the Transform tool (and leaving other gizmo settings in place).
* The focus for developers now shifts to bug fixing and documentation.
The next target is to fix all high priority bugs by mid June, then
release somewhere in July. Bug fixes that require deep changes and are
likely to cause other bugs should be done as early as possible.
* For contributors working on new features, we will not be able to
give much attention to code review in the coming month. It's best to
get patches in as good a state as possible so they are ready to review
and commit for 2.81.
* The Summer of Code coding period starts next Monday. Bastien will
set up branches and commit rights for students.

2) New Features and Changes

Images & Video

* Unsaved .blend and image file handling has been improved, so that
unsaved changes are unlikely to be lost. Images can now be saved to
disk along with the .blend file. New images that have not been saved
to disk yet will be packed into the .blend file. (Brecht Van Lommel,
Jacques Lucke)
* Image texture alpha modes have been changed. The new Channel Packed
mode can be used for channel packing as commonly used by game engines,
where the RGB and Alpha channels contain different images that should
not affect each other. The new None replaces the Use Alpha option.
(Brecht Van Lommel)
* Image editor panels have been reorganized to fit the new UI
guidelines. (Brecht Van Lommel)
* Sequencer menus and sidebar panels have been reorganized for
consistency and clarity. (Peter Fog, William Reynish)

Outliner

* Outliner visibility control has been further refined. Ctrl+click
isolates visibility for collection, while shift+click applies
visibility recursively for collections and parenting hierarchies.
(Dalai Felinto)
* The object properties now have a Visibility panel, to access the
same object visibility settings available in the outliner and easily
keyframe them. (Dalai Felinto)
* Display of active, selected and edited items in the outliner has
been tweaked. (Harley Acheson)

User Interface

* Theme colors for Blender Dark and Blender Light have been tweaked.
(Pablo Vazquez)
* Various new and updated icons for the interface. (Andrzej Ambroż,
Alessio Monti)
* Desktop icons have been updated for consistent colors across
platforms. (Yevgeny Makarov)
* The user interface for preferences auto-saving has been tweaked,
with preferences operations moved into a menu. For loading factory
settings, there is now the option to do it permanently to overwrite
existing preferences, or temporarily for testing. (Campbell Barton,
William Reynish)
* The Blender icon in the top bar now opens a menu for
application-level info, with Splash, Support Blender, Help and Install
Application Template.. menu entries move there. Some entries in the
File menu have been moved into Recover and Defaults submenus. (Pablo
Vazquez)

Render

* Eevee materials gained an option for backface culling. There was
already an option for the viewport, the new option exists to control
backface culling for renders and import/export. (Clément Foucault)
* Eevee subsurface scattering and volume rendering is now
automatically enabled when there are objects with these effects in the
scene. (Clément Foucault)
* Sun light size is now specified as an angle. This is the angular
diameter as seen from earth, which is between 0.526° and 0.545° in
reality. (Tim Stullich)
* Depth of field and film transparency settings are now shared between
Cycles and Eevee. (Jeroen Bakker)
* The OpenColorIO color management configuration was updated to remove
legacy transforms. This provides a clean base for future improvements.
(Brecht Van Lommel)
** Replace Log view transform with Filmic Log.
** Remove Rec.709, DCI-P3 displays that were incomplete and outdated.
** Remove outdated RRT and Film transforms, replaced by Filmic.
** Remove camera responsive curves that don't work with HDR colors.
** Rename Default view transform to Standard.

Other

* Custom Normal Editing: improved user interface. (Howard Trickey)
** Alt+N now opens the normal editing menu for quick access.
** Normal editing tools now automatically add the custom normal layer
and enable autosmooth.
** Face strength tools set the strength directly.
** These changes make the obscure Normal panel obsolete, so it has been removed.
* Objects: new 3D cursor alignment option when adding objects. (Hans
Goudey, Pablo Dobarro)
* Grease Pencil: new filter for onion skinning, to select only
specified keyframe types. (Antonio Vazquez)
* Armatures: Apply Pose as Rest Pose now has an option to only affect
the selected bones. (Alexander Gavrilov)
* Selection occlusion in multi-object edit mode is now working.
(Germano Cavalcante, Campbell Barton)

Python API

* The dependency graph and scene update Python API have been changed
to better reflect the internal dependency graph system. Despgraph API
documentation with usage examples is available. Scripts that access
meshes with modifiers or any other evaluated data-blocks will need to
be updated. (Sergey Sharybin)
https://docs.blender.org/api/blender2.8/bpy.types.Depsgraph.html

3) Weekly Reports

* Bastien: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Mont29/Foundation/2019#Week_296_-_05.2F11_to_05.2F17
* Brecht: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Brecht/Reports/2019#May_13_-_17
* Campbell: https://download.blender.org/ftp/ideasman42/donelist/2019.html#week-326-may-13
* Clément: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Hypersomniac/Foundation/2019
* Dalai: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Dfelinto/Reports/2019#May_13_-_17
* Jacques: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:JacquesLucke/Reports/2019#Week_33:_May_13_-_17
* Jeroen: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Jbakker/reports/2019
* Philipp: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:PhilippOeser/Foundation/2019#Calendar_Week_20_.2815hrs.29
* Sergey: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Sergey/Foundation/2019#Week_386:_13th_-_19th_May