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/
The idea is to re-use evaluated datablock from within current context.
This relies on the following factors:
- It expects scene to be fully evaluated before preview jobs starts.
- It expects datablocks to be localized.
Was causing temporal sampling artifacts when scene is set to Cycles
and viewport is set to Eevee. Visually was looking like ghosting or
motion blur when moving objects.
Both the scene and workspace had an active view layer, and it was confusing
which settings were being used or displayed where. Now we always have one,
so there is no mismatch.
The "View Layers" tab in the properties editor is now "View Layer", no longer
showing a list of layers. Instead view layers can be added and removed with
the workspace view layer selector. They are also listed and selectable in the
outliner.
Single layer rendering uses the active view layer from the workspace.
This fixes bugs where the wrong active view layer was used, but more places
remain that are wrong and are now using the first view layer in the scene.
These are all marked with BKE_view_layer_context_active_PLACEHOLDER.
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.
ViewRender was removed, which means we can't get the render engine for files
saved in 2.8. We assume that any files saved in 2.8 were intended to use Eevee
and set the engine to that.
A fix included with this is that .blend thumbails now draw with Clay mode,
and never Eevee or Cycles. These were drawn with solid mode in 2.7, and should
be very fast and not e.g. load heavy image textures.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D3156
The depsgraph was always created within a fixed evaluation context. Passing
both risks the depsgraph and evaluation context not matching, and it
complicates the Python API where we'd have to expose both which is not so
easy to understand.
This also removes the global evaluation context in main, which assumed there
to be a single active scene and view layer.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D3152
This was only used for viewport rendering, where we can just pass the engine
type directly. There is no technical reason why we can't draw the same depsgrpah
with different render engines.
It also led to some weird things like requiring a render engine for snapping
and raycast API functions.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D3145
- Undo that changes modes currently asserts,
since undo is now screen data.
Most likely we will change how object mode and workspaces work
since it's not practical/maintainable at the moment.
- Removed view_layer from particle settings
(wasn't needed and complicated undo).
- Use a single undo history for all operations.
- UndoType's are registered and poll the context to check if they
should be used when performing an undo push.
- Mode switching is used to ensure the state is correct before
undo data is restored.
- Some undo types accumulate changes (image & text editing)
others store the state multiple times (with de-duplication).
This is supported by checking UndoStack.mode `ACCUMULATE` / `STORE`.
- Each undo step stores ID datablocks they use with utilities to help
manage restoring correct ID's.
Needed since global undo is now mixed with other modes undo.
- Currently performs each undo step when going up/down history
Previously this wasn't done, making history fail in some cases.
This can be optimized to skip some combinations of undo steps.
grease-pencil is an exception which has not been updated
since it integrates undo into the draw-session.
See D3113
This module has no use now with the new DrawManager and DrawEngines and it
is using deprecated paths.
Moving gpu_shader_fullscreen_vert.glsl
to draw/modes/shaders/common_fullscreen_vert.glsl
User notes
----------
Compositing, rendering of multi-layers in Eevee should be fully working now.
Development notes
-----------------
Up until now we were still using the same depsgraph for rendering and viewport
evaluation. And we had to go out of our ways to be sure the depsgraphs were
updated.
Now we iterate over the (to be rendered) view layers and create a depsgraph to
each one, fully evaluated and call the render engines (Cycles, Eevee, ...) with
this viewlayer/depsgraph/evaluation context.
At this time we are not handling data persistency, Depsgraph is created from
scratch prior to rendering each frame. So I got rid of most of the partial
update calls we had during the render pipeline.
Cycles: Brecht Van Lommel did a patch to tackle some of the required Cycles
changes but this commit mark these changes as TODOs. Basically Cycles needs to
render one layer at a time.
Reviewers: sergey, brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D3073
Now that Eevee has support for offline rendering (F12) we can use it for
the Material previews.
Note: This makes the duplicated UI issue one panel worse. That happens when
Cycles if your scene engine, and Eevee is your workspace engine.
This separate context allows two things:
- It allows viewports in multi-windows configuration.
- F12 render can use this context in a separate thread and do a non-blocking render.
The downside is that the context cannot be used while rendering so a request to refresh a viewport will lock the UI. This is something that will be adressed in the future.
Under the hood what does that mean:
- Not adding more mess with VAOs management in gawain.
- Doing depth only draw for operators / selection needs to be done in an offscreen buffer.
- The 3D cursor "autodis" operator is still reading the backbuffer so we need to copy the result to it.
- All FBOs needed by the drawmanager must to be created/destroyed with its context active.
- We cannot use batches created for UI in the DRW context and vice-versa. There is a clear separation of resources that enables the use of safe multi-threading.
- Use BLI_threadpool_ prefix for (deprecated)
thread/listbase API.
- Use BLI_thread as prefix for other functions.
See P614 to apply instead of manually resolving conflicts.
This can be very slow if it contains a big texture, and it's not
necessarily setup in a useful way anyway, and materials can be used
in multiple scenes.
- Read-only access can often use EvaluationContext.object_mode
- Write access to go to WorkSpace.object_mode.
- Some TODO's remain (marked as "TODO/OBMODE")
- Add-ons will need updating
(context.active_object.mode -> context.workspace.object_mode)
- There will be small/medium issues that still need resolving
this does work on a basic level though.
See D3037
For simplicity we choose to execute the rendering of Opengl engines in the main thread and block the interface.
This might be addressed in the future at least for video rendering.
A drawmanager wrapper (DRW_render_to_image) is called by the render pipeline to set up the Opengl state and then call the specific draw_engine->render_to_image function.
General idea of the fix: skip the whole draw manager callback madness which
was used to tag object's engine specific data as dirty. Use generic recalc
flag in ObjectEngineData structure instead. This gives us the following
benefits;
- Sovles mentioned bug report.
- Avoids whole interface lookup for opened viewports for EVERY changed ID.
- Fixes missing updates when viewport is temporarily invisible.
Reviewers: dfelinto, fclem
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D3028
