Davis Sorenson's Portfolio

Feature progress, or lack thereof

Davis — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 19:58:29 +0000

…Long story short I’ve decided to do other projects before trying to mess with Blender’s code again. Blender’s code is heavy stuff that you don’t want to break. I need to break stuff.

Feature progress and Other Stuff

Davis — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 18:27:29 +0000

I have learned that it’s bad practice to just code away at a project in obscurity. So even though I have made (relatively) little progress, I will describe it anyway.

I decided to work on operators for the layers widget (Select/deselect all, invert selection), so I obviously started looking at the code. This is what I found:

There is actually an operator that selects all layers, accessed with the ´ key (Yes, seriously the “Grave accent”), but even though I actually have a keyboard that has it on it, I couldn’t get it to work. Changing it to something else worked.
That same operator only works when your mouse is in the 3D view, not with your mouse over the layers header or even the 3D view header.
The two similar operators that I thought of, the “Expand region” (AKEY on a region header) and “Reset property to default value” (DELKEY on a property, with CTRL it will only reset one property in an array like X/Y/Z, think of keyframing location vs. X-location) operators, both seem to be special kinds of operators.

Since the layers widget is not a button (Or a region header), that would mean I would need to give it its own handling in the events system. I would have to ask a dev about that.

So that is, in short, the progress.

Other stuff: On Friday I started porting a path tracer (SmallPT) to JavaScript, I would like to get it to work with HTML5 canvas, but I was forced to stop when I couldn’t find a JavaScript equivalent of a function. (erand48())

At work I’m working on a component of the RenderFarm.fi screensaver.

Call for small Blender feature suggestions

Davis — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 17:35:02 +0000

I can’t leave this site devoid of actual content of some sort, so I’m going to tell a bit about my contributions to the Blender source code.
Egoistic of me? A bit. But I’d like to give you an idea of what I can/can’t do.

So far, I have submitted three patches to the Blender patch tracker. Two are in the code now.

A menu in Python, specifically CTRL+TAB while in the UV editor. Yeah, I know. Watch out people, I’m the rockstar dev now!
A patch with a bunch of tooltips. Like I said, it’s me that’s making all the cool features in Blender nowadays.
(Not accepted) A patch that makes so that searching addons searches addon descriptions too. This one was literally a one-line change.

In addition, there are a couple of patches that I wrote that were just hacks or never worked out.

I modified some code so that you could toggle node shadows. This sped up Blender on an ancient laptop that I have (It turns 14 next year). This actually was only a year or so ago
Trident merge. (Joining one large window with two split windows, sort of hard to explain without pictures) This is far more exciting than anything else I’ve written, the problem is just… It didn’t work, and the code was horrible. I’m sure that Blender devs have dealt with worse code, but I couldn’t handle it and eventually just left it. Twice.

So now Blender development is in the feature-adding craze stage again, and I’d like to get back into hacking.

I’ve asked this before, but I’d like to ask it again; (As I looked at my list of stuff people wanted and it wasn’t really anything I could do) What small improvements, maybe in the UI, would you like to see in Blender? Something you think a n00b coder like myself could handle. Leave your answers in the comments… If they work. If they don’t, just tweet me. (@davissorenson)