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
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