Office Hours Summary 29th Nov 2009

Attendees: Yuu Nakamichi, 3D Melody, Dave Dubienski, Ezra Rasmuson, TommyJW Ninetails, Grogo Tungsten, Kerhop Seattle, hibit Spad, Gryff Richard, Nefertiti Redgrave, Kajo Laval

Passing by: irishredhead Ghost

The meeting started with a quick check of the versions of Primstar currently being used. About a third of the attendees were on 0.9.30, a third on 0.9.28 and the rest kept quiet so probably not updated recently

No one was aware of any problems with the scripts that would prevent a 1.0.0 release other than the documentation and library maps which still need completing.

3D asked whether accuracy issues on the ends of the cross.blend were related to the loop cut problem.

[14:11]  Domino Marama: no, it's related to my not giving out perfect blend files.. I always make sure there's something that needs cleaning up

[14:11]  Domino Marama: then people don't just bake n sell

[14:11]  Domino Marama: high quality blends will come when I get to doing tutorials

[14:14]  Domino Marama: The problem with the cross.blend was due to having too much mesh selected when I removed doubles. That's why it's got triangles on it

[14:14]  Domino Marama: Really need to be working on LOD3 to get away with triangles

3D then asked about the level of support for joined meshes planned for 1.0.0

[14:16]  Domino Marama: joined meshes should work.. not had much testing and sculptify doesn't support them.. that's not going to be in 1.0.0

[14:18]  Domino Marama: it should be fairly easy to add, currently sculptify is a combination of Reset UVs, Unwrap quads follow active and scaling the result to the uv map.

[14:20]  Domino Marama: the problem is that the quads follow active only does the first island. So it needs to start again on any faces left.. rinse and repeat.. put each island on a seperate image and joined mesh support in Sculptify is born

(Gryff has been testing joined mesh support since the meeting and found a bug)

There was a bit of discussion about the manual, and when Primstar 1.0.0 will be ready.

[14:54]  Domino Marama: I need to at least create all the manual pages.. Can't do a stable release until the manual links in the scripts are final

[14:55]  Domino Marama: Though the help system for scripts in Blender is terrible - I still want to do it right

[14:57]  Domino Marama: Help - Scripts Help Browser.. You then need to know which menu option the script you are interested in is under

[14:59]  Domino Marama: And key events only go to the gui when one of the input fields is selected, so I can't even hook a hotkey for help in there

[15:00]  Domino Marama: It's tempting to add a help button, but with some of the scripts not having a gui, it's only a partial solution

[15:02]  Domino Marama: So I'm sticking with the help browser, and "link 1" will go to the right page of the website for that script

There was also some general discussion about Blender 2.5 alpha 0, and a few tips on how to study the UV Layouts in Primstar which basically boiled down to adding each LOD size with 0 subdivision and placing them all on the LOD3 map to see how they all come together. I commented that more information on the UV Layout and the subsurf / multires workflows will be handled in the editing meshes part of the manual where they can be explained in context.

Yuu asked about how feedback for development was gathered.

[15:08]  Domino Marama: it's changed over time.. the website is the main way now.. in the early days I knew a lot of the users by name and would hassle them to find out how they were using the scripts.. then I'd add features to make what they were doing easier

[15:12]  Domino Marama: that's how the scripts got so complicated.. I basically took about a dozen different workflows and combined them.. Because I had the big picture, little feature adds (like Gaia's nurbs to sculptie conversion which is now Sculptify) often became much bigger when added to the mix

[15:14]  Domino Marama: When I started, I was trying to put a simpler interface over Blender, but as time went on I found it was more powerful to do things Blender's way where possible

Dave wanted to know when the manual would be done.

[15:34]  Domino Marama: I'm going to focus on that this next week. I want 1.0.0 out before christmas

[15:36]  Domino Marama: Hopefully I'll get all the pages the scripts need done, can finish the rest after release then

[15:37]  Domino Marama: It's just a pain with all the graphics editing. Can type loads without upsetting my wrist too much, but 10 mins on mouse kills

Kajo had just updated from an old version of Primstar and wanted to know why the meshes were behaving differently.

[15:58]  Domino Marama: The biggest change that throws people is that subsurf is now the default, it used to be multires

[16:02]  Domino Marama: if you are using sculpt mode in Blender, then change to multires before adding the sculpt mesh

Most people began leaving, and just 3D, Yuu and myself stayed chatting until about 5pm PST. The meeting was officially closed when I began snoring (1am here!).

I'm happy with how the meeting went, and intend holding another at the same time and place next week. Hopefully I've not missed anything important out in this summary, there was a lot more said and I've only pulled out the key points for Primstar here.