Dev:Doc/New Developer Advice

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Advice for New Developers

Preface

Every so often we have emails on the Blender mailing list with subjects like: "I'd like to get involved with Blender development".

This page is intended as a reply from active developers, giving practical advice to anyone who's new to Blender development and wants to get involved.

While there is no shortage of technical documentation for nearly every aspect of development,
this page focuses on how to approach taking your first steps.

Get Blender Building

Before thinking ahead too much and asking lots of questions about the code - just get Blender building.

See: Building Blender.

Setup a Development Environment

While a lot could be written about editors and IDE's and editors, here are some suggestions:

  • Using any programmers text editor with a search tool (even grep), is fine for C or Python development.
  • You may want to use different editors, one for Python, another for C/C++.
    (since we use different indentation settings, some edits such as Vim/Emacs allow per-filetype indentation configuration)
  • IDE's are more useful for C++ code, especially areas that use class inheritance since it's often not so obvious which members are available.
  • Some IDE's may have trouble with Blender!
    Blender source code is large enough that some IDE's are unusably slow.
    While not wanting to promote specific technologies, heres a short-list of IDE's known to work well for Blender development.
    • For Windows: Visual Studio MSVC is a popular choice.
    • For OSX: XCode.
    • For Linux there are a few options
      QtCreator is a popular choice, KDevelop is usable too, Eclipse & Netbeans are functional but can be slow.
Notes:
  • All IDE's mentioned support CMake for generating project files.
  • Some Blender developers don't use IDE's at all, with experience you may want use a development environment not mentioned here.
    The list above is just suggesting some starting points known to work for others.

Initial Development Setup

Whether you've already chosen you're development tools, or you're just getting started, once you can compile the code:

At a minimum you must be able to do these operations on the entire code-base quickly and easily:

  • Edit source code.
  • Lookup any file by name, for editing.
  • Search all text in the source code.
    (function names, tool-tips, comments... etc).

If you aren't sure how to do any of the operations above, take some time to investigate how to perform them, otherwise basic navigation of the source will be unnecessarily difficult.

See: Development Environment Setup.

Note on Configuration

At a minimum you'll need to configure your editor/IDE ...

  • Disable white-space stripping, some IDE's enable by default (adds noise to patches you make).
    If you can configure it only to strip white space on edited lines, thats fine too.
  • Set indentation to tabs, width 4 for C/C++.
  • Set indentation to spaces, width 4 for Python.

For details see: Code Style Configuration.

Pick a Project

So you're all ready to go, it's time to pick some project, this is difficult to give good general advice for since it's entirely up to your needs/interests.
Having said that, here are some things to consider.

  • In most cases we suggest to start really small and treat it as an exercise, your first project may not end up being useful and even things you would expect to be easy might not be.
    This also helps you become used to navigating the source code, reading it, making edits - and understanding it. While you do this you can think of more ambitious/interesting things to change too, so this time isn't wasted.
  • As for what to work on, feel free to ask around but everyone will give different suggestions.
    • Add a Feature - This is often the most fun but before spending a lot of time on this it's best to find out if the feature would even be accepted, some features are intentionally not added to Blender because they don't fit well with the existing design.
      Look into our Quick Hacks page for a list of approved projects, suitable for beginners.
    • Improve a Feature - When using Blender you might run into some simple limitation - Lasso select tool didn't work on UV editor for example, or that the smooth tool doesn't work on a lattice
      Making improvements like this is good because you're working within the current design and there's a much higher chance of having your work accepted.
    • Fix a bug - take care with this, bug fixes are welcome of course but can often be quite complicated to investigate and you may end up spending a lot of time and still not find a fix.
      Hint, recently reported bugs are often less trouble to resolve!
    • Janitor Work - To get a patch accepted and to get to know the code, contact developers and to generally follow the whole process; more mundane patches can still help you get involved.
      • tooltip/spelling corrections.
      • fixes/improvements to the build-system.
      • quiet compiler warnings.
      • installer / packaging improvements.
  • Avoid small patches which only tweak existing behavior or tweaks to defaults (early on at least). These kinds of changes are very easy for existing developers to make, so it's not really all that helpful to send such opinionated patches.
    It's common for people to come to Blender from other software and want to make it work how they like, but it's not the purpose of Blender to be a clone of another application.
    At least learn the Blender way before trying to make Blender behave like some other application, perhaps what you want can be done with key-map modifications, or added as a user preference, but to start with it's best to avoid controversial changes.
    - You risk spending too long on discussions with existing maintainers - before you have a good understanding of internal workings.
  • For a definitive answer on weather your project might be accepted - talk to the developer(s) who would review you work:
    See: Module Owners.

Communicate with Other Developers

Normally when you start out you'll have lots of questions, not all of them can be documented - so here are the 2 main ways Blender developers communicate.

Further Suggestions

  • Disable most features when building Blender (Game-Engine, Collada, FFMpeg, Cycles, LibMV... etc) - will speed up rebuilds considerably.
    Unless you intend to develop on any of these areas of course.
  • While you will eventually want to use a debugger to step over the source,
    try using printf() for debugging, sometimes if you're not sure of how something works it's good to add prints into the code, for your own code or even if you read it and want to understand it better, this is a very simple/stupid way to check on things but handy, fast rebuilds make this less of a hassle.

Things to Learn

Here are things you'll probably want to learn as you get into development.

  • Learn to search the source code *efficiently*
    (if you see a word in the interface, chances are searching for it will take you to the code related to it, or close enough).
  • Learn basic regex (many search tools & IDE's support them), it looks confusing but you can find some cheat sheets online to help.
  • Learn how to create and apply patches (to share your changes with others)
  • Learn to use a debugger to at minimum check the file and line number of a crash (view a stack trace).
  • Use git to make temporary branches, stashing changes and apply patches.
    Allow for some time to become comfortable using git, initially simply updating is enough to get started, but eventually you will want to use some of it's more advanced features.
  • Use 'git blame' to find who changed some line of code, when and why.
  • Rather than guessing why something is slow, use a profiler - there are many profilers around and from my experience they all have tradeoff's between setup time, execution speed and useful output.
  • If you're debugging memory related errors on Linux.
    Try Valgrind or Address-Sanitizer, they're very useful tools and in some cases can save hours of tedious troubleshooting.

Other Info


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