This feature is limited (only byte PPM output, no multi-view),
only works with specific configurations.
This also causes some maintenance overhead
when testing changes to the render pipeline.
For Blender 2.8 we had to be compatible with very old OpenGL versions, and
triple buffer was designed to work without offscreen rendering, by copying
the the backbuffer to a texture right before swapping. This way we could
avoid redrawing unchanged regions by copying them from this texture on the
next redraws. Triple buffer used to suffer from poor performance and driver
bugs on specific cards, so alternative draw methods remained available.
Now that we require newer OpenGL, we can have just a single draw method
that draw each region into an offscreen buffer, and then draws those to
the screen. This has some advantages:
* Poor 3D view performance when using Region Overlap should be solved now,
since we can also cache overlapping regions in offscreen buffers.
* Page flip, anaglyph and interlace stereo drawing can be a little faster
by avoiding a copy to an intermediate texture.
* The new 3D view drawing already writes to an offscreen buffer, which we
can draw from directly instead of duplicating it to another buffer.
* Eventually we will be able to remove depth and stencil buffers from the
window and save memory, though at the moment there are still some tools
using it so it's not possible yet.
* This also fixes a bug with Eevee sampling not progressing with stereo
drawing in the 3D viewport.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D3061
== Main Features/Changes for Users
* Add horizontal bar at top of all non-temp windows, consisting out of two horizontal sub-bars.
* Upper sub-bar contains global menus (File, Render, etc.), tabs for workspaces and scene selector.
* Lower sub-bar contains object mode selector, screen-layout and render-layer selector. Later operator and/or tool settings will be placed here.
* Individual sections of the topbar are individually scrollable.
* Workspace tabs can be double- or ctrl-clicked for renaming and contain 'x' icon for deleting.
* Top-bar should scale nicely with DPI.
* The lower half of the top-bar can be hided by dragging the lower top-bar edge up. Better hiding options are planned (e.g. hide in fullscreen modes).
* Info editors at the top of the window and using the full window width with be replaced by the top-bar.
* In fullscreen modes, no more info editor is added on top, the top-bar replaces it.
== Technical Features/Changes
* Adds initial support for global areas
A global area is part of the window, not part of the regular screen-layout.
I've added a macro iterator to iterate over both, global and screen-layout level areas. When iterating over areas, from now on developers should always consider if they have to include global areas.
* Adds a TOPBAR editor type
The editor type is hidden in the UI editor type menu.
* Adds a variation of the ID template to display IDs as tab buttons (template_ID_tabs in BPY)
* Does various changes to RNA button creation code to improve their appearance in the horizontal top-bar.
* Adds support for dynamically sized regions. That is, regions that scale automatically to the layout bounds.
The code for this is currently a big hack (it's based on drawing the UI multiple times). This should definitely be improved.
* Adds a template for displaying operator properties optimized for the top-bar. This will probably change a lot still and is in fact disabled in code.
Since the final top-bar design depends a lot on other 2.8 designs (mainly tool-system and workspaces), we decided to not show the operator or tool settings in the top-bar for now. That means most of the lower sub-bar is empty for the time being.
NOTE: Top-bar or global area data is not written to files or SDNA. They are simply added to the window when opening Blender or reading a file. This allows us doing changes to the top-bar without having to care for compatibility.
== ToDo's
It's a bit hard to predict all the ToDo's here are the known main ones:
* Add options for the new active-tool system and for operator redo to the topbar.
* Automatically hide the top-bar in fullscreen modes.
* General visual polish.
* Top-bar drag & drop support (WIP in temp-tab_drag_drop).
* Improve dynamic regions (should also fix some layout glitches).
* Make internal terminology consistent.
* Enable topbar file writing once design is more advanced.
* Address TODO's and XXX's in code :)
Thanks @brecht for the review! And @sergey for the complaining ;)
Differential Revision: D2758
If no custom URL was set, add-ons would get a "Report a Bug" button opening
the default developer.blender.org bug tracker. Now we only add this default
button if the add-on is bundled and not installed by the user.
For experimental options, outside the scope of typical preferences.
While templates are developed we might want to make changes
to behavior which aren't fully compatible with typical work-flows.
Instead of mixing these options in with current preferences
expose separately (we could even force disable them when templates
aren't int use)
Adds thin/default/thick modes to add -1/0/1 to the auto detected line width,
while leaving the overall UI scale unchanged.
Also tweaks the default line width threshold, so thicker lines start from
slightly high UI scales.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2778
This commit does the main integration of workspaces, which is a design we agreed on during the 2.8 UI workshop (see https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.8/UI/Workshop_Writeup)
Workspaces should generally be stable, I'm not aware of any remaining bugs (or I've forgotten them :) ). If you find any, let me know!
(Exception: mode switching button might get out of sync with actual mode in some cases, would consider that a limitation/ToDo. Needs to be resolved at some point.)
== Main Changes/Features
* Introduces the new Workspaces as data-blocks.
* Allow storing a number of custom workspaces as part of the user configuration. Needs further work to allow adding and deleting individual workspaces.
* Bundle a default workspace configuration with Blender (current screen-layouts converted to workspaces).
* Pressing button to add a workspace spawns a menu to select between "Duplicate Current" and the workspaces from the user configuration. If no workspaces are stored in the user configuration, the default workspaces are listed instead.
* Store screen-layouts (`bScreen`) per workspace.
* Store an active screen-layout per workspace. Changing the workspace will enable this layout.
* Store active mode in workspace. Changing the workspace will also enter the mode of the new workspace. (Note that we still store the active mode in the object, moving this completely to workspaces is a separate project.)
* Store an active render layer per workspace.
* Moved mode switch from 3D View header to Info Editor header.
* Store active scene in window (not directly workspace related, but overlaps quite a bit).
* Removed 'Use Global Scene' User Preference option.
* Compatibility with old files - a new workspace is created for every screen-layout of old files. Old Blender versions should be able to read files saved with workspace support as well.
* Default .blend only contains one workspace ("General").
* Support appending workspaces.
Opening files without UI and commandline rendering should work fine.
Note that the UI is temporary! We plan to introduce a new global topbar
that contains the workspace options and tabs for switching workspaces.
== Technical Notes
* Workspaces are data-blocks.
* Adding and removing `bScreen`s should be done through `ED_workspace_layout` API now.
* A workspace can be active in multiple windows at the same time.
* The mode menu (which is now in the Info Editor header) doesn't display "Grease Pencil Edit" mode anymore since its availability depends on the active editor. Will be fixed by making Grease Pencil an own object type (as planned).
* The button to change the active workspace object mode may get out of sync with the mode of the active object. Will either be resolved by moving mode out of object data, or we'll disable workspace modes again (there's a `#define USE_WORKSPACE_MODE` for that).
* Screen-layouts (`bScreen`) are IDs and thus stored in a main list-base. Had to add a wrapper `WorkSpaceLayout` so we can store them in a list-base within workspaces, too. On the long run we could completely replace `bScreen` by workspace structs.
* `WorkSpace` types use some special compiler trickery to allow marking structs and struct members as private. BKE_workspace API should be used for accessing those.
* Added scene operators `SCENE_OT_`. Was previously done through screen operators.
== BPY API Changes
* Removed `Screen.scene`, added `Window.scene`
* Removed `UserPreferencesView.use_global_scene`
* Added `Context.workspace`, `Window.workspace` and `BlendData.workspaces`
* Added `bpy.types.WorkSpace` containing `screens`, `object_mode` and `render_layer`
* Added Screen.layout_name for the layout name that'll be displayed in the UI (may differ from internal name)
== What's left?
* There are a few open design questions (T50521). We should find the needed answers and implement them.
* Allow adding and removing individual workspaces from workspace configuration (needs UI design).
* Get the override system ready and support overrides per workspace.
* Support custom UI setups as part of workspaces (hidden panels, hidden buttons, customizable toolbars, etc).
* Allow enabling add-ons per workspace.
* Support custom workspace keymaps.
* Remove special exception for workspaces in linking code (so they're always appended, never linked). Depends on a few things, so best to solve later.
* Get the topbar done.
* Workspaces need a proper icon, current one is just a placeholder :)
Reviewed By: campbellbarton, mont29
Tags: #user_interface, #bf_blender_2.8
Maniphest Tasks: T50521
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2451
The issue here is that the preferences are still used because both can be accessed from the 3D View, view menu. In the future, it is likely that the old mode will be removed (maybe 2.8?) but for now we want to keep both operational.
Differential revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2320
For Windows 8.1 and X11 (Linux, BSD) now use the DPI specified by the operating
system, which previously only worked on macOS. For Windows this is handled per
monitor, for X11 this is based on Xft.dpi or xrandr --dpi. This should result
in appropriate font and button sizes by default in most cases.
The UI has been simplified to a single UI Scale factor relative to the automatic
DPI, instead of two DPI and Virtual Pixel Size settings. There is forward and
backwards compatibility for existing user preferences.
Reviewed By: brecht, LazyDodo
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2539
This adds the ability to switch between different application-configurations
without interfering with Blender's normal operation.
This commit doesn't include any templates,
so its mostly to allow collaboration for the Blender 101 project
and other custom configurations.
Application templates can be installed & selected from the file menu.
Other details:
- The `bl_app_template_utils` module handles template activation
(similar to `addon_utils`).
- The `bl_app_override` module is a general module
to assist scripts overriding parts of Blender in reversible way.
See docs:
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/advanced/app_templates.html
See patch: D2565
Although this wasn't so obvious since it
only showed up for factory settings and in the preferences window.
Panel display order depends on registration order,
Sorry for the noise. On the bright side we no longer need to move
classes around to re-arrange panels.
Intended to replace legacy GL_SELECT, without the limitations of
sample queries which can't access depth information.
This commit adds VIEW3D_SELECT_PICK_NEAREST and VIEW3D_SELECT_PICK_ALL
which access the depth buffers to detect whats under the pointer,
so initial selection is always the closest item.
The performance of this method depends a lot on the OpenGL
implementations glReadPixels.
Since reading depth can be slow, buffers are cached for object picking
so selecting re-uses depth data, performing 1 draw instead of 3
(for 24, 18, 10 px regions, picking with many items under the pointer).
Occlusion queries draw twice when picking nearest,
so worst case 6x draw calls per selection.
Even with these improvements occlusion queries is faster on AMD hardware.
Depth selection is disabled by default, toggle option under select method.
May enable by default if this works well on different hardware.
Reviewed as D2543
For the multi-GPU case users still have to reconfigure the devices they want to use.
Based on patch from Lukas Stockner.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2347
Previously, it was only possible to choose a single GPU or all of that type (CUDA or OpenCL).
Now, a toggle button is displayed for every device.
These settings are tied to the PCI Bus ID of the devices, so they're consistent across hardware addition and removal (but not when swapping/moving cards).
From the code perspective, the more important change is that now, the compute device properties are stored in the Addon preferences of the Cycles addon, instead of directly in the User Preferences.
This allows for a cleaner implementation, removing the Cycles C API functions that were called by the RNA code to specify the enum items.
Note that this change is neither backwards- nor forwards-compatible, but since it's only a User Preference no existing files are broken.
Reviewers: #cycles, brecht
Reviewed By: #cycles, brecht
Subscribers: brecht, juicyfruit, mib2berlin, Blendify
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2338
