[Bf-committers] Developer meeting notes September 30, 2019

[Brecht Van Lommel]

Here are the notes from today's developer meeting. The next meeting is
October 7, 10:00 CEST (08:00 UTC). #blender-coders on blender.chat.

Announcements
=============

* Less than 2 weeks left in the Blender 2.81 Bcon2. Developers, please
check that the remaining list of tasks is complete. If you think an
assigned task will not make it in time, let us know and we can figure out a
solution. Bug fixes that are somewhat safe can still be done in Bcon3, but
more risky ones should be done as soon as possible.
https://developer.blender.org/project/board/88/
* Patrick Mours now has Blender commit rights to work on Cycles CUDA and
Optix directly.

New Features And Changes
=====================

* Motion Paths: much faster updates, measured to be 15x in a Spring
production file. This is accomplished by only updating the part of the
scene and the frame range that is affected by edits. (Sergey Sharybin)
* Motion Tracking: highlight keyframes in path visualization. (Sergey
Sharybin)
* Cursors: native operating system cursors are now used in more cases, and
many Blender specific cursors were redesigned. Particularly on Windows and
macOS, cursors look much better on high DPI displays. (Harley Acheson,
Duarte Farrajota Ramos, William Reynish)
* Grease Pencil: new smart smooth algorithm for strokes. (Antonio Vazquez)

Retopology
----------------

Voxel Remesh (Pablo Dobarro)
* New options to reduce the number of poles and better preserve volume.
* New adaptivity setting to use fewer triangles on flat areas.
* New shortcut: Ctrl+R.

Quadriflow Remesh  (Pablo Dobarro)
* Symmetry support. This bisects the mesh and performs remeshing on one
half, then mirrors the result.
* New shortcut: Ctrl+Alt+R.

Sculpting
-------------

Continued polishing of the new tools, user interface and default settings.
(Pablo Dobarro)

* Pose brush: new origin offset option, which calculates the direction of
the bone and adds an offset to it.
* Scrape brush: support accumulate and enable by default.
* Brush cursor and radial control: display strength and brush curve
preview, interaction tweaks for consistency.

Performance improvements for sculpt mesh drawing, to skip parts of the mesh
outside the viewport and better use multiple CPU cores when editing many
vertices. (Brecht Van Lommel)

Projects Under Development
=====================

* Ray Molenkamp experimented with using the TBB allocator and Clang for
Windows. The TBB allocator gives good improvements in Cycles BVH build
time, but this may become less important once we switch to Embree. For
Clang the generated AVX2 code was not correct, so that's not something we
can immediately use.
* Phabricator on developer.blender.org will be updated with some changes
this week. An email with details will be sent to the bf-committers mailing
list once this is done. (Sergey Sharybin)
* Draw call batching optimizations in the viewport still have stability
issues. We will continue to work on it, but if it's not sufficiently stable
by the end of Bcon2 it moves to 2.82. (Clément Foucault)

Weekly Progress Reports
===================

* Bastien Montagne:
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Mont29/Foundation/2019#Week_315_-_09.2F21_to_09.2F27
* Brecht Van Lommel:
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Brecht/Reports/2019#September_23_-_27
* Campbell Barton:
https://download.blender.org/ftp/ideasman42/donelist/2019.html#week-245-september-23
* Clément Foucault:
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Hypersomniac/Foundation/2019#Week_141_:_23rd_-_29th_September
* Dalai Felinto:
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Dfelinto/Reports/2019#September_23_-_27
* Germano Cavalcante:
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Manowii/Reports/2019#Week_13:_23rd_-_27th_September
* Jeroen Bakker:
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Jbakker/reports/2019#Week_201939:_2019.2F09.2F23_-_2019.2F09.2F29
* Jacques Lucke:
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:JacquesLucke/Reports/2019#Week_52:_September_23_-_27
* Julian Eisel:
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Severin/Reports/Institute_2019#September_23_-_September_29
* Nathan Letwory:
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:JesterKing/Reports/2019#September_23_-_September_27_.2F_.2313
* Pablo Dobarro:
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Pablodp606/Reports/2019#September_23_-_27
* Philipp Oeser:
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:PhilippOeser/Foundation/2019#Calendar_Week_39_.28Sep_23rd_-_Sep_27th.29
* Sebastián Barschkis:
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Sebbas/Reports/2019#September_23_-_27
* Sebastian Parborg:
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Zeddb#Sep_23_-_Sep_27
* Sergey Sharybin:
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Sergey/Foundation/2019#Week_404:_23rd_-_29rd_September
* Sybren Stüvel:
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Sybren/Reports/2019#Sept_23_-_29