Dev:SundayMeetingAgenda/2007-08-19th

SoC updates

Deep Shadow map and caching

"mostly done" original goals were met "a month ago" more ambitious versions of the goals are in progress. Has bugs to squash and can be hopefully 'done' this week and ready for code review. Joeedh will mail the list when he is ready for review.

Bevel

The bevel tool is working, functional, and has a lot of nice features. however, there are some strange artifacts resulting (I'm assuming) from skinny faces/zero-length edges and/or concave polys. these are pesky buggers, I have no idea when I'll be able to track them down and fix them. Also, code-wise, there are still some integration issues. integration issues mainly being incorporating the changes suggested to me by others (transform by theeth, and other stuff pointed out by Briggs). One of the main ones being to get rid of edge crease and vertex weights in the modifier, and implement a custom bevel value. I'd also like to talk more with theeth about using Transform() better.

Sound API

A few commits remain related to mixdown and scrubbing. Should be ready for integration review by Monday or so.

Render API

The render API is certainly not finished. I haven't finished the geometry specifications, much less touched on materials and textures. Furthermore, this week I came to two unfortunate conclusions. First, the render module API, (functions with the RE_ prefix) is very much tied up with the internal render details. This means that in order to get the internal renderer hooked up via the render API, the render module API needs to be redesigned. This is definitely out of the scope of my project. However, this means that what I've been working on for the last several weeks: getting the internal renderer working, is pretty much impossible. It has the prerequisite of the render module API being rewritten. So, because of this I suggest that the current aim for the render API is to be to hook up external renderers via plugins, and not to hook up blender internal renderer. That can reasonably be done in a later step.

Second, I think I could have gotten the rest of the geometry done by this week if I hadn't come upon a rather important oversight that I made early on. I left out render layers. I spent the past several days trying to redesign the API to put them in. I ended up trying to make too large changes too quickly, and simply failed at that.

so, in conclusion, I obviously have not made the deadline for SOC, but if I may be allowed to continue working on this, I would like to revert all of my internal render / pipeline changes, decide on a good method of dealing with render layers, and continue implementing the API for the sake of plugins. getting plugins working, writing plugins, designing the API, implementing the API - AND - hooking up blender internal. I would agree in retrospect that that was off the deep end in terms of ambition... especially with all of the design that I was doing, it would have been extremely helpful to have someone to work with.

Ton will need time to evaluate the work. He doesn't mind skipping the requirement to have blender using new api, but then at least one other renderer should work.

GLSL

until colorbands everything is done jut have problems with some curves and surfaces normals, and on specular colorband blending modes value, color and hue. have created the main structure for texturing and tried to do magic and didn't get the right results. the other thing missing is nodes for which i've created generic functions and i believe to have nodes working, except textures in a few days about compatibility issues, it didn't work on ati cards still had some int variables in glsl code which aren't supported by the ati driver, but don't know if now it works or not. the most important thing was to have it working on nvidia and then find out the problems on ati and do the tweaks. ah also need to do some changes and create just a texture for all colorbands as right now a texture is created for each colorband and there is no need

Current Projects

particles - still todo on unified baking is the caching system and rebaking from a certain frame after editing the bake. If there aren't any big bugs found then it's about done for me, theeth and others could do some code reviews soon. I'd also like to get more feedback on the workflow and ui.. there's much to improve on those still.

image browser - ready for merge review and feedback. After that I'm willing to work on any needed fixes/changes.

ndof - sculpt works, but lukep would like some changes to sculpt rotation (use a low res version so view rotation happens faster). Also ndof does too many undo pushes currently

2.45 schedule

As soon as one last fix is committed ready for RC2 - should be tuesday and then final on next sunday if all goes well.

Objectives and schedule for 2.5/3.0

major projects to merge for 2.5 are Jahkas particles update; elubies thumb work; Genschers cloth; and the SoC projects.

event refactor - Ton has a lot on his plate and thus the work on the refactor may need to be done by others on the team. In a couple of months Ton will have a 'producer' who can take over a lot of the admin and overhead work that are sucking up his time but until then he won't have much time for event refactor. Lukep is going to evaluate and integrate the event refactor related proposals. Decisions on the way forward will be made at next meeting or so.

http://jlp.nerim.net/dev/event%20system/

http://www.blender.org/development/architecture/window-manager/

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Competitive_Analysis/Tool_API_Refactor