NOTE: While most of the milestone 1 goals are there, a few smaller features and
improvements are still to be done.
Big picture of this milestone: Initial, OpenXR-based virtual reality support
for users and foundation for advanced use cases.
Maniphest Task: https://developer.blender.org/T71347
The tasks contains more information about this milestone.
To be clear: This is not a feature rich VR implementation, it's focused on the
initial scene inspection use case. We intentionally focused on that, further
features like controller support are part of the next milestone.
- How to use?
Instructions on how to use this are here:
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Severin/GSoC-2019/How_to_Test
These will be updated and moved to a more official place (likely the manual) soon.
Currently Windows Mixed Reality and Oculus devices are usable. Valve/HTC
headsets don't support the OpenXR standard yet and hence, do not work with this
implementation.
---------------
This is the C-side implementation of the features added for initial VR
support as per milestone 1. A "VR Scene Inspection" Add-on will be
committed separately, to expose the VR functionality in the UI. It also
adds some further features for milestone 1, namely a landmarking system
(stored view locations in the VR space)
Main additions/features:
* Support for rendering viewports to an HMD, with good performance.
* Option to sync the VR view perspective with a fully interactive,
regular 3D View (VR-Mirror).
* Option to disable positional tracking. Keeps the current position (calculated
based on the VR eye center pose) when enabled while a VR session is running.
* Some regular viewport settings for the VR view
* RNA/Python-API to query and set VR session state information.
* WM-XR: Layer tying Ghost-XR to the Blender specific APIs/data
* wmSurface API: drawable, non-window container (manages Ghost-OpenGL and GPU
context)
* DNA/RNA for management of VR session settings
* `--debug-xr` and `--debug-xr-time` commandline options
* Utility batch & config file for using the Oculus runtime on Windows.
* Most VR data is runtime only. The exception is user settings which are saved
to files (`XrSessionSettings`).
* VR support can be disabled through the `WITH_XR_OPENXR` compiler flag.
For architecture and code documentation, see
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Source/Interface/XR.
---------------
A few thank you's:
* A huge shoutout to Ray Molenkamp for his help during the project - it would
have not been that successful without him!
* Sebastian Koenig and Simeon Conzendorf for testing and feedback!
* The reviewers, especially Brecht Van Lommel!
* Dalai Felinto for pushing and managing me to get this done ;)
* The OpenXR working group for providing an open standard. I think we're the
first bigger application to adopt OpenXR. Congratulations to them and
ourselves :)
This project started as a Google Summer of Code 2019 project - "Core Support of
Virtual Reality Headsets through OpenXR" (see
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Severin/GSoC-2019/).
Some further information, including ideas for further improvements can be found
in the final GSoC report:
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Severin/GSoC-2019/Final_Report
Differential Revisions: D6193, D7098
Reviewed by: Brecht Van Lommel, Jeroen Bakker
Introduce new IDTypeInfo structure.
Each ID type will have its own, with some minimal basic common info,
and ID management callbacks.
This patch only does it for Object type, for demo/testing purpose.
Moving all existing IDs is a goal of next "cleanup Friday".
Note that BKE_idcode features should then be merged back into BKE_idtype -
but this will have to be done later, once all ID types have been properly
converted to the new system.
Another later TODO might be to try and add callbacks for file read/write,
and lib_query ID usages looper.
This is part of T73719.
Thanks to @brecht for initial idea, and reviewing the patch.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D6966
This commit adds the download, extract, patch, build, and install of the
Universal Scene Description (USD) library to the `install_deps.sh`
script.
Reviewed By: mont29, LazyDodo
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D6478
Was caused by recent refactor of dependencies in 517870a4a1.
While there is no fully reliable solution to this issue other than
making TBB a dynamic library dependency (as documentation tells us
to do), there seems to be simple workaround which doesn't require
deeper changed in build process and packaging.
Tested on Brecht's computer who managed to reproduce the issue on
Linux (T72015#857423).
This avoids the problem where Blender doesn't start because
the PYTHONPATH points to an incompatible Python version,
see T72807.
Previously we chose to assume people who set the PYTHONPATH know what
they're doing, however users may have set this for non Blender projects.
So it's not obvious that this is the cause of Blender not to launch
on their system.
To use Python's environment vars, pass the argument:
--python-use-system-env
Note that this only impacts Python run-time environment variables
documented in `python --help`, Access from `os.environ` remains.
This commit introduces the first version of an exporter to Pixar's
Universal Scene Description (USD) format.
Reviewed By: sergey, LazyDodo
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D6287
- The USD libraries are built by `make deps`, but not yet built by
install_deps.sh.
- Only experimental support for instancing; by default all duplicated
objects are made real in the USD file. This is fine for exporting a
linked-in posed character, not so much for thousands of pebbles etc.
- The way materials and UV coordinates and Normals are exported is going
to change soon.
- This patch contains LazyDodo's fixes for building on Windows in D5359.
== Meshes ==
USD seems to support neither per-material nor per-face-group
double-sidedness, so we just use the flag from the first non-empty
material slot. If there is no material we default to double-sidedness.
Each UV map is stored on the mesh in a separate primvar. Materials can
refer to these UV maps, but this is not yet exported by Blender. The
primvar name is the same as the UV Map name. This is to allow the
standard name "st" for texture coordinates by naming the UV Map as such,
without having to guess which UV Map is the "standard" one.
Face-varying mesh normals are written to USD. When the mesh has custom
loop normals those are written. Otherwise the poly flag `ME_SMOOTH` is
inspected to determine the normals.
The UV maps and mesh normals take up a significant amount of space, so
exporting them is optional. They're still enabled by default, though.
For comparison: a shot of Spring (03_035_A) is 1.2 GiB when exported
with UVs and normals, and 262 MiB without. We probably have room for
optimisation of written UVs and normals.
The mesh subdivision scheme isn't using the default value 'Catmull
Clark', but uses 'None', indicating we're exporting a polygonal mesh.
This is necessary for USD to understand our normals; otherwise the mesh
is always rendered smooth. In the future we may want to expose this
choice of subdivision scheme to the user, or auto-detect it when we
actually support exporting pre-subdivision meshes.
A possible optimisation could be to inspect whether all polygons are
smooth or flat, and mark the USD mesh as such. This can be added when
needed.
== Animation ==
Mesh and transform animation are now written when passing
`animation=True` to the export operator. There is no inspection of
whether an object is actually animated or not; USD can handle
deduplication of static values for us.
The administration of which timecode to use for the export is left to
the file-format-specific concrete subclasses of
`AbstractHierarchyIterator`; the abstract iterator itself doesn't know
anything about the passage of time. This will allow subclasses for the
frame-based USD format and time-based Alembic format.
== Support for simple preview materials ==
Very simple versions of the materials are now exported, using only the
viewport diffuse RGB, metallic, and roughness.
When there are multiple materials, the mesh faces are stored as geometry
subset and each material is assigned to the appropriate subset. If there
is only one material this is skipped.
The first material if any) is always applied to the mesh itself
(regardless of the existence of geometry subsets), because the Hydra
viewport doesn't support materials on subsets. See
https://github.com/PixarAnimationStudios/USD/issues/542 for more info.
Note that the geometry subsets are not yet time-sampled, so it may break
when an animated mesh changes topology.
Materials are exported as a flat list under a top-level '/_materials'
namespace. This inhibits instancing of the objects using those
materials, so this is subject to change.
== Hair ==
Only the parent strands are exported, and only with a constant colour.
No UV coordinates, no information about the normals.
== Camera ==
Only perspective cameras are supported for now.
== Particles ==
Particles are only written when they are alive, which means that they
are always visible (there is currently no code that deals with marking
them as invisible outside their lifespan).
Particle-system-instanced objects are exported by suffixing the object
name with the particle's persistent ID, giving each particle XForm a
unique name.
== Instancing/referencing ==
This exporter has experimental support for instancing/referencing.
Dupli-object meshes are now written to USD as references to the original
mesh. This is still very limited in correctness, as there are issues
referencing to materials from a referenced mesh.
I am still committing this, as it gives us a place to start when
continuing the quest for proper instancing in USD.
== Lights ==
USD does not directly support spot lights, so those aren't exported yet.
It's possible to add this in the future via the UsdLuxShapingAPI. The
units used for the light intensity are also still a bit of a mystery.
== Fluid vertex velocities ==
Currently only fluid simulations (not meshes in general) have explicit
vertex velocities. This is the most important case for exporting
velocities, though, as the baked mesh changes topology all the time, and
thus computing the velocities at import time in a post-processing step
is hard.
== The Building Process ==
- USD is built as monolithic library, instead of 25 smaller libraries.
We were linking all of them as 'whole archive' anyway, so this doesn't
affect the final file size. It does, however, make life easier with
respect to linking order, and handling upstream changes.
- The JSON files required by USD are installed into datafiles/usd; they
are required on every platform. Set the `PXR_PATH_DEBUG` to any value
to have the USD library print the paths it uses to find those files.
- USD is patched so that it finds the aforementioned JSON files in a path
that we pass to it from Blender.
- USD is patched to have a `PXR_BUILD_USD_TOOLS` CMake option to disable
building the tools in its `bin` directory. This is sent as a pull
request at https://github.com/PixarAnimationStudios/USD/pull/1048
In older versions the ms crt was only a few dlls, in recent versions
this jumped to over 40 leading to quite a bit of clutter in our
bin folder.
This change moves the CRT into its own folder.
For developers that generally already have the runtime globaly
available on their machine, there is a new cmake option
(WITH_WINDOWS_BUNDLE_CRT, default ON) that you can use to toggle
installing the runtime to the blender bin folder, and save some
time during the initial build, this option is off by default for
only the developer profile.
Reviewed By: brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D6132
We had a manifest file, but it was seemingly not used, some
settings were done using linker pragmas, some of them visual
studio would set by default for us, others where not set at all.
This patch changes:
- Single manifest file where we can maintain all settings in
a single location, removal of any linker pragmas related to
the manifest.
- Compatibly settings for win vista - win10, without this any
call to any of the GetVersion and related functions (GetVersionEx,
VerifyVersionInfo, IsWindowsXxxx) will by default say we are
on vista and OS specific optimizations in external libraries may
be missed.
-Rather than having it in the .RC file in an #ifdef which may
or may not trigger depending on the build tool used, we tell
cmake to treat it as a source file and it will do the right
thing for both the ninja and visual studio generators.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D6136
Reviewers: brecht
This was added years ago to prepare for code-signing the executable
but was never used, buildbots use a different mechanism now to sign
so no need to keep this around.
TBBMalloc seems to have a race condition somewhere on shutdown
that seems to show up in debug builds only, ideally we find the
issue and send a patch upstream but due to its racy nature it
has eluded capture so far. This patch disables TBBMalloc for
debug builds so that developers that actually need to get some
work done can work without being bothered by this misbehaviour.
This commit adds a new command line argument --debug-ghost and
makes it so X11 errors happening during context initialization
are only printed when this new flag is sued.
There is no need to flood users with errors when their GPU is
not supporting latest OpenGL version. Or, at a very minimum,
the error must be more meaning full.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D6057
This changes integrates code signing steps into a buildbot worker
process.
The configuration requires having a separate machine running with
a shared folder access between the signing machine and worker machine.
Actual signing is happening as a "POST-INSTALL" script run by CMake,
which allows to sign any binary which ends up in the final bundle.
Additionally, such way allows to avoid signing binaries in the build
folder (if we were signing as a built process, which iwas another
alternative).
Such complexity is needed on platforms which are using CPack to
generate final bundle: CPack runs INSTALL target into its own location,
so it is useless to run signing on a folder which is considered INSTALL
by the buildbot worker.
There is a signing script which can be used as a standalone tool,
making it possible to hook up signing for macOS's bundler.
There is a dummy Linux signer implementation, which can be activated
by returning True from mock_codesign in linux_code_signer.py.
Main purpose of this signer is to give an ability to develop the
scripts on Linux environment, without going to Windows VM.
The code is based on D6036 from Nathan Letwory.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D6216
The heap on windows is single threaded causing it to lag behind linux in performance in allocation heavy multithreaded scenarios, BVH building is a prime example.
See https://developer.blender.org/D6218 for benchmark results
for testing with the allocator enabled/disabled you can set the environment variable TBB_MALLOC_DISABLE_REPLACEMENT=1 to disable the TBB allocator.
Reviewed By: @sergey
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D6218
Removes custom logic from buildbot's packing step.
This also removes icons/ folder, but CMake was already copying the
icons to the root of the install folder.
Campbell Barton
Sergey Sharybin
Brecht Van Lommel
Dalai Felinto
Brecht Van Lommel
Julian Eisel
Bastien Montagne
Sybren A. Stüvel
Antonio Vazquez
Ray Molenkamp
Philipp Oeser
Julian Eisel
Harley Acheson
Gaia Clary
Laurent Noel