Cosmos Laundromat

Here is a quick update for what happened since the last post!

We had Sergey here for some weeks, and invited Brecht, Lukas and Antony to be here some days as well – to discuss planning for the Gooseberry pilot. The developers themselves will present many more details about their work here later (and they’re busy bug fixing and with the release 2.71 now). But here’s a summary.

Compositor:

• Sergey joins the module owner team
• Work on memory usage and converting nodes to use tiles and/or openCL commences. Main bottleneck is nodes that don’t tile yet (vblur, glare).
• Better sampling (for scaling especially)
• Canvas awareness (images or renders or textures all get a coordinate reference frame – including handles to interactively move/scale/rotate this)
• Precentage update (first do quick 25% of size, then full)

Dependency graph

• Lukas takes a lead here
• Investigate last year’s Joshua Leung’s work here, work with him on picking this up
• Make a final (design) proposal for how this will work, also involving physics, baking, caching, alembic, threading, nodify-everything, etc.

Physics

• Antony continues investigating solvers for cloth or hair
• Investigate proper integration with dependency, alembic, caching, etc

Nodes

• Lukas checks on extending particle node design to make it a more generic “Object Node” system. This could include constraints and modifiers and python.

Hair tools

• Antonis will look at hair editing specifically. Hair editmode might just stay as it is, but could need a recode to fit with the other new code.

Cycles

• Sergey will join the team to help on speedup investigation in general – faster ray tracing, new spatial optimize systems, caching etc.
• More about Cycles and roadmap is coming later here.

VSE

• Antony will check on the video editor, what needs to be done to get this back in active development? The director also needs this… and we like to get a good “story tool” in Blender as well as online and for the asset manager…

Asset manager, cloud, etc

• Bart will post a first analysis of requirements soon, to serve as public discussion review as well.
• We’ll get Campbell here (most certainly) for 3 months, starting in October. He’s great in this stuff too, and can help us with the implementation of asset/project tools – especially on the python and Blender side.
• Francesco will keep working on Cloud functionality – for all cloud subscribers as well as for the artists who will use it to collaborate on the film.

And then there’s very cool other projects already going on, of which OpenSubdiv and the Viewport recode (OpenGL upgrade to version 3 and 4) is the most relevant for us.

More details, as usual, follow. Right now we’re preparing for a big office refresh… going to paint the floors, some walls, get better lights in studio, etc. All to be ready for july when the first people come to work on Gooseberry!

-Ton-

 

 

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