[Soc-2010-dev] Status Report

[Konrad Kleine]

Hello!

I began this week with fixing the errors that occurred in my branch after merging with the trunk. I switched back and forth between Linux (ATI driver issues all the time), Windows (strange stack changes and no good or fast IDE) and MacOSX (works best for me). When talking to Bob about this he suggested that I should work on image layers instead and write patches for the trunk instead of committing to my branch. In a quick meeting with Tom and Bob we talked about the features of the image layers.

Campbell pointed me at Blender's OpenEXR capabilities and how Blender stores multiple render layers and their passes in OpenEXR files. I looked at the code and found that it was only written for Render Layers and not Image Layers in general. That's why I contacted Nicholas Bishop and asked for a good approach to integrate layers into Blender without breaking any code. We finally agreed on a way and I wrote it down here: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Kwk/Gsoc2010/ImageLayers

Currently I'm still working on the infrastructure for image layers, meaning that they need a UI to add/remove layers, or order them, or set their properties. This involved a lot of RNA work as you can read on the page above. 

In the next week I plan to finish the image layer infrastructure that is living separately inside an Image struct ASAP and do some documentation work, although I did comment my source code and wrote wiki pages for most of the things I did during summer of code. Here are some pages so far, the unification work is not included in this because it was basically inspired by the VPaint code.

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Kwk/Gsoc2010/ImageLayers
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Kwk/Gsoc2010/BumpMapPainting
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Kwk/Gsoc2010/AutoSelectPaintImage

I feel like I'm on schedule thanks to Bob who allowed me to work on the topic rather than on architectural issues with my branch. Believe me when I say that one more day and I would have thrown my laptop out of the window. You cannot imagine how often my complete system crashed when doing nothing special like loading an image or something like that.

-Konrad