Dev:2.8/Viewport/Meeting-16.09.28
September 28th, 2016
The meeting happened informally between Ton Roosendaal and Dalai Felinto at the Blender Institute on top of the Viewport design posted on code.blender.org [1]. It is summed up here with its core points, to help refine the presented design towards an implementation and data flux document.
目次
Introduction
The post on code.blender.org was aimed at the user experience, work structure and deliverables. It was built with a few assumptions that need extra clarification when we bring the original Blender 2.8 data design diagram [2] to the table:
Layers not plates
It is fine to keep the concept of plates as the atomic components of the visualization pipeline. From the data evaluation and usability point of view, however, layers or passes may be a more clear concept. Part of the motivation for non-linear elements (i.e., plates) was to allow for individual data fetching per viewport. So it would be up to the viewport to determine if we would get animated fluids, particles, …
If we think on layers, we can expand Julian Eisel’s Layer Manager project [3] and build on it. This gives a direction for UI and usability as well.
Layers belong to the scene data
We will support per-viewport layer overwrite, and de/activation. But to determine which data (objects, …) we may use has to be set in a scene level. To illustrate this, think of a viewport that shows objects A and B, and another viewport that shows objects C and D. Which objects would appear in the Dopesheet? How about the outliner? And the node editor?
UI/UX - user interface and usability
The original idea was to keep user interface out of the development cycle until the Workflow sprint in late November. However it will be more powerful to explore a route (on top of the layer management project) to present and discuss at the sprint. We then adapt our functionalities after the sprint if needs be, or use it as a start point to tackle other areas of Blender.
Documentation
A diagram expanding the original Blender 2.8 data design will help keeping everyone on the same page. The idea is to put together a diagram with the viewport drawing dataflow and see how long it lives. An updated version of the posted document should be kept in wiki.blender.org for future reference and later updates.
Next steps
A new editor will be created to host the new drawing code. The idea is to port over any code that may be re-used, while getting one of the MVPs started. As soon as possible the gsoc layer code will be merged to start controlling the layers and exploring the new UI.
Links
[1] - https://code.blender.org/2016/09/blender-2-8-viewport-development
[2] - https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.8/Source/DataDesign
[3] - https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Julianeisel/GSoC-2016
