Viewport Fx expected date of integration in master

I have dug around a bit, and still not find a expected merge date for the viewport upgrades…

is there a blog I can follow or any better place to watch over its progression to master?

Probably because there isn´t one. No, seriously, no sarcasm. I´ve been keeping tracks on this as well, and the latest I heard/read, was that it was going slow for some reason…

What about optional default keymap? As i remember Jonathan and Pavel did some work?..
Thanks

As far as I know the project lacks proper design plans for now, so I assume they’d be working to settle that before diving into the technics (what I mean by design is UX).

Weekly meeting 17th May 2015:

  1. Other projects
  • Viewport project is still not progressing really well.
    Partially it’s because time is too much shattered from contributors, and partially because there’s still no commonly agreed on strategy or master plan design.

Ton Roosendaal suggests to add a dedicated viewport mailing list for people who want to be active in the project and who are interested in it, and first settle on the big picture.
Details follow.

I can’t find any ML though.

I never understood why people waste their time waiting for features they knew will take time to come. I mean if my livelihood depends on an essential tool I would work overtime, find a second job, borrow some money from friends or relatives, just to be able to buy Maya, Max, etc.

I wonder if we’ll get it in time for 2.9…It should be given a higher priority, but this doesn’t seem to be the case.

You have to wait for features to come out in any software.It takes time to develop the software.It does not come instantly.

Exactly. I remember Silo developers (I believe it’s a two-man collaboration) years ago making the mistake of announcing they were adding sculpting features in the app. Then the waiting began like it’s going to be done in a week or something. Their forum was deluged with waiting customers. A year gone by and they’re waiting as if the completion was just around the corner. About more than two years have passed and the devs finally were forced to release it. Of course, it’s riddled with bugs in the first version. Today, nobody even mentions using Silo’s sculpting. :wink:

Point was, if that waiting was spent on working to buy Zbrush and learning it things would have been more productive.

I am not holding my breath, it has just been planned for a very very long time.
(see viewport fx 1, 2 and 3)

and I would like to know how its progressing,

it seems to me that it will have to touch on many parts of the code,
also, if done correctly it will open up android as blender platform.
it will improve sculpting, and any other very high poly operation.

if the same code is shared from the viewport to the bge, it will bring it up like a Phoenix from it’s ashes. and pave the way to sell bge games through steam for android…

it’s pretty important.

ViewportFX has been in development for 3-4 years already. I think people understand things take time, but this project seems to have an on-again, off-again dev cycle reminiscent of Bmesh, which makes people anxious.

Anyway, only ETA I’ve ever seen on it was this, which listed it sometime this year. Not sure if that is still the case or not.

March – May 2015

  • Grant for Mike Erwin, to work on the Viewport upgrade project – GLSL/PBR shader editing and drawing.

Hard to argue it´s not taken on priority, but I suspect once Psy-Fi is freed up after Gooseberry that development will accelerate…

I wish that at least Ton created the list he proposed to try to solve the lack of direction.

So remember that claim that Gooseberry will mess with priorities in general development and come first above all else… and the BF keeps denying it like some how people are stupid… Yeah… The point is they will focus their time and effort on their pet project at the time. For now its the failed crowd funded project Gooseberry (aka CL), next it might be Agent whatever. Ton and co dont really seem to give the impression of being able (or wanting) to multi-task on development outside of the film projects, could be wrong but theres no indication thats occurring.

The design and roadmap for blender as an application are far more important than any film project they can fart out, yet the inconsistent interest/action in putting those first seems to be the biggest problem with Blender. Its why I dont blame people for looking at other applications, its that kind of implied behavior that pushed me over to modo as my primary driver for now.

In theory, if the Open Movies was more or less the only priority for the BF, then we shouldn’t have seen the enhancements made to the BGE, Dyntopo, the decimation modifier, the modeling tools, ect… simply because they’re not explicitly needed in order to get the Gooseberry project done.

The same with the new Delta Mush (Corrective Smooth) modifier and Cycles Portal lights. Let’s not also forget that Ton created a Steam page for Blender (along with a recent tutorial series on game asset design that theoretically “shouldn’t” have happened because of Gooseberry).

There’s other non-Gooseberry related projects going on as well, Julian (Severin) is redesigning the UI graphics to resolve a number of visual issues and other quirks for instance.

Anyway, I agree that the viewport rewrite could use a higher priority and better planning, but it’s only one of a large number of tasks that still face the developers before all of Blender can be seen as truly modernized.

Ace, do you really think that Gooseberry hasn’t slowed down general development?

the viewport, is the very core of blender. unless you can model in python.

People questioning the wisdom of the Supreme Leader? beware, it is a hanging offence in Blenderland.

Looking at the total commit log sizes, it’s been pretty steady. Most of the work these days on new stuff occurs in branches and aren’t committed to master until it is done (even more so than during the days that SVN was used).

looking at the commit log sizes, 1825 of those steady commits were in the gooseberry branch. 568 were in the alembic branch, done directly for gooseberry.

That’s almost 2400 commits that were redirected away from master development.

So, again, do you really think that Gooseberry hasn’t slowed down general development?