OVERVIEW
* In 2.7 terminology, all layers and groups are now collection datablocks.
* These collections are nestable, linkable, instanceable, overrideable, ..
which opens up new ways to set up scenes and link + override data.
* Viewport/render visibility and selectability are now a part of the collection
and shared across all view layers and linkable.
* View layers define which subset of the scene collection hierarchy is excluded
for each. For many workflows one view layer can be used, these are more of an
advanced feature now.
OUTLINER
* The outliner now has a "View Layer" display mode instead of "Collections",
which can display the collections and/or objects in the view layer.
* In this display mode, collections can be excluded with the right click menu.
These will then be greyed out and their objects will be excluded.
* To view collections not linked to any scene, the "Blender File" display mode
can be used, with the new filtering option to just see Colleciton datablocks.
* The outliner right click menus for collections and objects were reorganized.
* Drag and drop still needs to be improved. Like before, dragging the icon or
text gives different results, we'll unify this later.
LINKING AND OVERRIDES
* Collections can now be linked into the scene without creating an instance,
with the link/append operator or from the collections view in the outliner.
* Collections can get static overrides with the right click menu in the outliner,
but this is rather unreliable and not clearly communicated at the moment.
* We still need to improve the make override operator to turn collection instances
into collections with overrides directly in the scene.
PERFORMANCE
* We tried to make performance not worse than before and improve it in some
cases. The main thing that's still a bit slower is multiple scenes, we have to
change the layer syncing to only updated affected scenes.
* Collections keep a list of their parent collections for faster incremental
updates in syncing and caching.
* View layer bases are now in a object -> base hash to avoid quadratic time
lookups internally and in API functions like visible_get().
VERSIONING
* Compatibility with 2.7 files should be improved due to the new visibility
controls. Of course users may not want to set up their scenes differently
now to avoid having separate layers and groups.
* Compatibility with 2.8 is mostly there, and was tested on Eevee demo and Hero
files. There's a few things which are know to be not quite compatible, like
nested layer collections inside groups.
* The versioning code for 2.8 files is quite complicated, and isolated behind
#ifdef so it can be removed at the end of the release cycle.
KNOWN ISSUES
* The G-key group operators in the 3D viewport were left mostly as is, they
need to be modified still to fit better.
* Same for the groups panel in the object properties. This needs to be updated
still, or perhaps replaced by something better.
* Collections must all have a unique name. Less restrictive namespacing is to
be done later, we'll have to see how important this is as all objects within
the collections must also have a unique name anyway.
* Full scene copy and delete scene are exactly doing the right thing yet.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D3383https://code.blender.org/2018/05/collections-and-groups/
Without this we need to have the context to get the
(space_type, mode) args for an active tool lookup.
For event handling & poll its more convenient to have direct access.
This patch adds support for:
- Per space-type tools (3D view and edit).
- Per mode tools (object, edit, weight-paint .. etc).
The top-bar shows the last activated tools options, this is a design
issue with using a global topbar to show per-space settings.
See D3395
There are a few places where DerivedMesh is still used, most notably
when calling the (not yet ported) cloth simulation. There is also still
the use of Object.derivedDeform and Object.derivedFinal. Those places are
marked with a TODO.
Some functions in the editors module were copied to accept Mesh. Those
already had 'mesh' in the name; the copies are suffixed with '__real_mesh'
for easy renaming later when the DM-based functionality is removed.
Scroll-bars are now hidden unless the cursor approaches them, in which case they
smoothly grow and become more & more visible. Note that since 0d309144020168e55,
scroll-bars are drawn on top of editor contents. There's no more jumping of
buttons when scroll-bars appear.
Technical notes:
* AZones are used to adjust scrollbars based on mouse movements
We may want to support screen level AZones if we want scrollbars to also
smoothly appear when approaching them from a different area.
I also plan to make further changes to AZones to clean up stuff a bit.
* Had to move AZone handling to a post ARegion init stage, since we need the
updated View2D data from there.
* View2D masks and scroller rectangles are now updated on every redraw. It's
cheap to do that though.
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
Timelines and Logic Editors are gone. So far they were simply replaced by broken
Info Editors, now they are replaced by Dopesheets in the new Timeline mode.
We reuse ScrArea.butspacetype to temporarily store the space-type identifier of
the deprecated editor (see 9db492de6d). That way we can identify it in
versioning code and replace it nicely.
Action editor creation needs a scene to set the scrolling based on frame range.
Active screen-layouts use the active scene of the window they are displayed in.
Inactive screens simply use the first scene in the main data base.
Note that inactive editors don't need version patching, readfile.c converts them
to SPACE_EMPTY already, so users can't activate them.
Files saved since the editors were removed will still be broken.
Workspace config files saved before this will also crash (will update default
one in followup commit).
The only real reason we need `butspacetype` is while switching areas, where we
need to delay the actual switch to the RNA _update callback since only there we
can access context.
So instead of trying to sync it with `spacetype`, only set while needed and
unset it afterwards (as in set to `SPACE_EMPTY`).
This should also allow us to re-use `butspacetype` in versioning code when
trying to read removed editors. It'll store the space type value of the removed
editor which we can then use on versioning.
For backwards compatibility, we store `butspacetype` with the value of
`spacetype`.
These were runtime only data, used in pre 2.8 Blender to make use of GL vertex arrays
to draw these more efficiently. Maybe we might restore these sometime as an optimisation
step, but for now, they're not needing and were confusing.
== 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
It is hidden behind the --debug-io flag for now.
Idea is to try to catch broken libraries state in current Main before we
actually write the file on disk, should help catching and understanding
what happens in Spring corruption cases.
While the feature is interesting, it's not much from what we can tell.
Retargeting is an important feature but needs
to fit in better with typical animation work-flows.
See: T52809
Brecht authored this commit, but he gave me the honours to actually
do it. Here it goes; Blender Internal. Bye bye, you did great!
* Point density, voxel data, ocean, environment map textures were removed,
as these only worked within BI rendering. Note that the ocean modifier
and the Cycles point density shader node continue to work.
* Dynamic paint using material shading was removed, as this only worked
with BI. If we ever wanted to support this again probably it should go
through the baking API.
* GPU shader export through the Python API was removed. This only worked
for the old BI GLSL shaders, which no longer exists. Doing something
similar for Eevee would be significantly more complicated because it
uses a lot of multiplass rendering and logic outside the shader, it's
probably impractical.
* Collada material import / export code is mostly gone, as it only worked
for BI materials. We need to add Cycles / Eevee material support at some
point.
* The mesh noise operator was removed since it only worked with BI
material texture slots. A displacement modifier can be used instead.
* The delete texture paint slot operator was removed since it only worked
for BI material texture slots. Could be added back with node support.
* Not all legacy viewport features are supported in the new viewport, but
their code was removed. If we need to bring anything back we can look at
older git revisions.
* There is some legacy viewport code that I could not remove yet, and some
that I probably missed.
* Shader node execution code was left mostly intact, even though it is not
used anywhere now. We may eventually use this to replace the texture
nodes with Cycles / Eevee shader nodes.
* The Cycles Bake panel now includes settings for baking multires normal
and displacement maps. The underlying code needs to be merged properly,
and we plan to add back support for multires AO baking and add support
to Cycles baking for features like vertex color, displacement, and other
missing baking features.
* This commit removes DNA and the Python API for BI material, lamp, world
and scene settings. This breaks a lot of addons.
* There is more DNA that can be removed or renamed, where Cycles or Eevee
are reusing some old BI properties but the names are not really correct
anymore.
* Texture slots for materials, lamps and world were removed. They remain
for brushes, particles and freestyle linestyles.
* 'BLENDER_RENDER' remains in the COMPAT_ENGINES of UI panels. Cycles and
other renderers use this to find all panels to show, minus a few panels
that they have their own replacement for.
Folders removed entirely:
* //extern/recastnavigation
* //intern/decklink
* //intern/moto
* //source/blender/editors/space_logic
* //source/blenderplayer
* //source/gameengine
This includes DNA data and any reference to the BGE code in Blender itself.
We are bumping the subversion.
Pending tasks:
* Tile/clamp code in image editor draw code.
* Viewport drawing code (so much of this will go away because of BI removal
that we can wait until then to remove this.
For correct results these must have been set already when the depsgraph was
created and evaluated, so all dependencies have appropriate resolutions too.
For particle we no longer backup and restore the viewport particles to avoid
overwriting them during render, as copy-on-write solves this for us. Even
without COW particles seem to work ok.
This also removes the particle simplification options based on camera. This
was never used much and only available in Blender Internal.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D3148
Cycles is no longer using this. There are still addons using it but for
correct results with the new depsgraph this API should not be used.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D3143
For the performance we convert object bases list to an array
during view layer evaluation. This makes it possible to have
very cheap index-based base lookup.
The goal of this change is to get rid of base used for function
binding, and avoid scene datablock expansion at the depsgraph
construction time.
