[Soc-2016-dev] Weekly Report #08, Mantaflow Liquids

[Sebastián Barschkis]

Hello everyone,

another week, another report :) Here are some Mantaflow updates:

https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Sebbas/GSoC_2016/Reports/Week_8

= Week 8 =

=== What's been done ===

* So this week I bumped into a discussion on IRC on building the fluid-mantaflow
branch on Windows. I had always mentally postponed the Windows build but
apparently this week reality caught up.

* Building itself was fairly uncomplicated. There was just the old smoke library
that had to be removed.

* The main issue under Windows was (and still is) that it is unable to run the
Mantaflow script snippets. My first guess was that I would have to load
Mantaflow scripts, the strings themselves, differently. But this did not help
the cause.

* Eventually I figured that the problem with Windows is the static Mantaflow
linking. Under Mac and Linux we can achieve this with the appropriate flags
(i.e. "--whole-archive"). For Windows, however, I did not find a similar option
and to my understanding one has to dynamically link a lib (i.e. using .dll).

=== Next up ===

* Just as last week the idea is to get the UI ready. I have already received
some suggestions (thanks for that!) and will probably bring up one or the other
topic in the #blenderui chat.

* Some university exams are coming up, so I'll try to balance that.

=== Questions ===

* I found the bmesh library setup quite interesting. It's split into python lib
and internal lib. Maybe it would be a good idea to use such a setup for
Mantaflow as well? I am not really happy with the static Mantaflow linking and
maybe this can help the case.

=== Notes ===

* Windows users: It was nice looking into the Windows build but I think fixing
it is not the top priority at the moment. For now, maybe you can try the Linux
build?

Best wishes,
Sebastián