Dev:SundayMeetingAgenda/2007-08-12th

GSOC

hcube finished the bidirectional looped sample playing code and also the sound data cacheing code, no testing files yet. will create a testing build and post it to the forum

other SOCers were not present this meeting

Current Projects

particles - Jahka has gotten most things back working with unified baking data structs etc.. still some new functionality missing, but he should be able to commit his current work some time this week before he codes the last new features.

cloth - Genscher has solved all pending bugs on "collision pruning" and is going to collision detection now which should be mostly copy-paste and thus hopefully go quickly

bmesh primitives - mfoxdogg has only have isosphere to go, they are aligned to view like before, a few new options have been coded like inner loops http://dominomf.com/smcfiles/mfoxdogg_bmesh_cylinders3.jpg patch is available in tracker

2.45

Still some pending bugs and commits that need to be addressed before an RC2. Once the commits are made bdiego will announce an RC2.

Siggraph Report

Blenders acceptance by industry is steadily growing. Of those who visted the booth roughly 20% were already using Blender; 30% had seen it before; 25% had heard of it but never seen or used; and another 25% or so had never seen it before according to Roland Hess who demoed Blender for the 3 days of Siggraph. Sony is officially supporting Erwins Bullet work, and a number of computer scientists have expressed interest in having their work integrated into Blender. In particular http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~ashapiro/ Ari Shapiro is one developer who will soon be contributing to Blender.

Another point of interest is that Blender was one of the few software products giving live demos, most other vendors were using canned presentations.

Also according to Roland - "i wish i could convey to you all the pleasure it was to show someone modeling/rigging, etc., have them think its cool, and then say something like "and here's the integrated node-based compositor" and have their jaw hit the floor"

Another point that made a strong positive impression were the sculpt and retopo tools.

A number of the visitors stated that adopting Blender into their pipeline was being held up by two issues 1) Custom bindings/Interfaces (ie so they can have their Maya keybindings the same; or for simplified interfaces for training) 2) Better import/export support particularly FBX support so that animation and rigs can be 'round tripped'

Ton mentioned that the small-medium sized 3d programs are 'disappearing'