Any News about Viewport FX II ?

Hi, I’m trying to find if there is any news about http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Jwilkins/GSoC2013/Viewport_FX_II_Proposal

If there is a Alpha/Beta version of Blender with it !?

Thank you !

It seems that nobody knows anything new about this project !?

If you want to read the weekly GSOC reports look at http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/soc-2013-dev/

I’ve been looking for the same thing since the start of GSOC this year. No idea why the project has no wiki at all, everyone else has had one since the beginning, and they were very strict about having one. Odd.

I’ve been checking the mailing list progress every week, but there is no end of project video, and the final report usually should go in the wiki.

what should the video show? the whole project is basically just a huge refactoring of the drawing code so ideally you shouldn’t see any difference.

That’s no excuse. It could easily show a comparison of framerates, viewport response on different situations, new possibilities that the new code gives (better transparency, more polys, different draw modes, who knows), even if they aren’t implemented yet. If nothing can be showed, a video just explaining the changes with some simple examples would suffice, even if the examples aren’t directly made in blender.

The community is not owed such a video. From my point of view, it would be a waste of time. There’s nothing relevant to end-users in there so far. What has been changed/implemented has been documented. In particular, there’s now an abstraction layer that will help run Blender on OpenGL ES based devices (such as tablets), which doesn’t use any deprecated OpenGL functionality anymore.
I guess “Viewport FX” is a misnomer, because neither has the viewport code been changed much, nor were there any “effects” implemented.

Ok, then no video can be made at least explaining what the work was about? I don’t see why not. But if you believe the community doesn’t “deserve it”, then who does? Only a few developers?

“Can” be made? Sure. Needs to be made? No. The video requirement (if applicable) was set by the Blender developers, so if they don’t need it, it’s not made. If you want to know what happened, why don’t you read the documentation? Why should time be wasted on making a video?
As for whether the community “deserves” it, I don’t know. Ask Santa Clause whether the community has been good this year. However, it isn’t owed it. Google or the Blender mentors are entitled to ask for it, not the community. If you start funding development, that’s when you can start asking for things.

In case of blender Devs are End users and End users are Devs. Of course no one should be kept away from information about this project. That being said, what has been done in this project is already documented, but only in a technical language that not everyone might understand fully. If someone does not understand from these notes then maybe they wont benefit much from getting it explained in other media ie. videos…

It has been already explained here:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Jwilkins/GSoC2012/Viewport_FX_Proposal

It would be nice to know what actually has been implemented, what it means to blender, and when/if it will show in in trunk during the 2.7x cycle. But I agree, we aren’t exactly OWED this. :slight_smile:

This GSOC (and the previous one) has been always quite polemic as no real results were showed a an user level point of view. I’m not goint to enter in a discussion showing my point of view. All I want to say is that I hope there’s no GSOC 2014: Viewport FX III , I would rather see the resources used in a different way. I was even surprissed to see this Viewport FX II this year after the results of the previous GSOC.

I dunno, outside of the paid Devs, there’s no loss to be had from any dev working on such project. Hell, even if Willikins’ Gsoc proposal consisted of making pretty pink butterflies fly around the viewport, if’s not actually preventing the other gsocers from coding or sucking resources from the BF.

In one of Jwilken’s replies (on the mailing list) is this.

I see fixing the situation as taking one step at a time while making sure
things don’t get terribly broken in the meantime.

In other words, he is fully aware of what he has done and what he needs to do yet to give the viewport code a modern design, but he only has so much time and it’s less complex to take things in incremental stages. He already has done a lot of rewriting of some major chunks of the viewport code (in terms of removing deprecated OpenGL methods and implementing modern ones), but there’s quite a lot of code to work through and we can’t really see an ultra-fast viewport filled with graphical capabilities until they can be sure that the base won’t break out from under it.

It’s like how we didn’t see tangible results from the 2.5 project in the immediate months after its initiation and we had to wait awhile until we saw clear advantages for the user compared to 2.49, it’s the same for the viewport rewrite, in part because one would at least expect the old feature set to be working and ready to go by the time it’s ready for merging into trunk.

Makes sense to me :wink:

Yes, because I remember the main themes of a lot of 2.5 project discussions, people asking just what the 2.5 project will mean for them. That’s not to mention the parts where people made complaints of Blender 2.5 being stuck in perpetual beta and questioning if the entire thing was worth it due to not yet seeing a major boatload of benefits that weren’t there in 2.49. On top of that, the long feature freeze also did its share of bringing out the pessimist in some people (that was until it was lifted and we started seeing tons of new stuff for 2.6x).

Polemic? I don’t agree. You want to hear something polemic? Here we go:

The “Viewport FX” approach is wrong. Blender should stop supporting any pre-OpenGL4 hardware and have the drawing code completely rewritten. Blender should not try to support OpenGL ES, WebGL, Angle or any other inadequate technology (including pre-Mavericks Mac OS). Blender drawing code should be at the edge of what is technologically feasible, Blender users should be required to keep their hardware up-to-date. Blender isn’t some kind of game that needs to satisfy a large market, it is a highend tool that should not be held back by yesterdays technology.

It’s a bit of ironic that Blender was initially written for workstations that costs tens of thousands of dollars, yet its minimum requirements essentially stayed the same for all these years.

“Viewport FX” is the result of trying to pander to everything: The old viewport codebase, the old feature set, the userbase with outdated hardware, the people who would like to see Blender running on tablets or Raspberry Pi’s, etc. The result is a lot of work for an abstraction layer that users like SamCameron are unable to understand the value of.

You have to make up your minds which side you want to be on: Mine (the elitist, dismissive side) or the idealistic one (Blender should “democratize” CG) and value the work being done, accordingly.

Agreed, a rewrite would be best. And I don’t see why we couldn’t have the old one as an option, like maya, that has 3 types of viewports, the “default”, a “high quality default”, and a totally differnt one “viewport 2.0”.

I just want to be able to interact smoothly with 3, 4 million poly mesh ! Do a retopo without a slowdown ! Just like in Softimage for example !