Call for Testing

BMesh is now in the alpha testing stage.  It’s reached the point where it needs user testing to further progress and identify bugs.

You can find builds on graphicall.org, and report bugs on redmine.  Please use the redmine bug tracker!  Feel free to leave comments in the blog, of course.

Build Links

Please use a build no older then November 4th.

Linux SuSe: http://www.graphicall.org/builds/builds/showbuild.php?action=show&id=1164

Win32: http://graphicall.org/builds/builds/showbuild.php?action=show&id=1165

QuickStart

Dissolve is xkey->dissolve, and vertex connect is ykey.  Those two are used a lot, so it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with them.  Subsurf now works with ngons, which allows for all sorts of cool modeling tricks (and to get rid of the ngons you simply apply the first level of subsurf).

I’ve also made a start of feature notes on blender.org.

Crash Recovering

Blender will now save recovery files on crashing.  So if blender crashes, look for a [filename].crash.blend file.   Note that the recovery file will not include changes made in editmode, so I’d suggest cycling through editmode/objectmode every once in a while.

Known Issues

• GLSL draw mode doesn’t work.
• Edge Slide doesn’t work.
• Particles are buggy.
• MultiRes hasn’t been brought back yet.
• Sculpting may not work.
• The vkey rip tool isn’t quite finished yet.

Notes

Not everything works yet.  Some parts need attention by their maintainers, e.g. particles and MultiRes, and are things I shouldn’t really be dealing with (meddling in ) myself.  And I’m sure there’s a great many bugs I’ve not uncovered yet myself.

On the other hand, things are fairly functional.  Most tools have been ported over.  Only a few are missing.

Donate!

Please remember to donate, even small contributions help.  Donations are what allow me to spend as much time on bmesh as I do.

Status Update

I’ve been rather busy moving (and sick) the past month or so, so I didn’t get  as much work done as I’d like.  I’m just about finished moving though, and I’ve started putting more time into BMesh again.

BMesh is very close to being testable; I’m currently merging recent changes from 2.5 into the BMesh branch before tying up some loose ends and putting out a call for testing.

I did manage to find time to rewrite the vkey split tool; it now behaves much the same as the edge split modifier, making it a lot more useful.   The old tool was very hackish, and getting the new one to work well turned out to be quite a bit of effort, but it’s almost working now (it still has a few cases that need attention).  The new tool is much more usable then the old one; it can handle many more situations.

Once I’ve gotten the merge done and vkey finished up, I’ll post a call for testing on the blog.  I’ll also provide links to a special BMesh bug tracker, which will be hosted on Nathan Letwory’s new redmine installation.

I’m hoping to get BMesh into the main development trunk sometime early next year; when this happens will depend a lot on future sculpt/multires developments (and how difficult it’ll be to port them to BMesh).  One of the purposes of Durian is to develop a fast sculpting/multires system, so BMesh cannot be merged into trunk until that gets going (and is ported over to BMesh).

Thanks to everyone who have donated; it’s very, very helpful.  It allows me to spend considerably more time on BMesh then I’d be able to otherwise, and is responsible for the success of this project.

Demo Video

Michael Fox has kindly put together a bmesh demo video for me, you can watch it on vimeo, or at his blog.

Status Update

The BMesh project has been going well.  A new developer, Wael El Oraiby, has joined the project.  He’s been very helpful in porting some of the remaining old editmesh tools to BMesh.

BMesh is now much closer to being feature-complete (and testable) then it was before.  Subsurf is working, including uv/vcol interpolation (though the “subsurf uv” option hasn’t been brought back yet).  The UV editor works, as does vertex paint and weight paint.

On the tools side, Wael ported over the selected similar tool (shift-g).  I’ve recoded the merge tools, which properly collapses uv and vcol data (as per the design of the old tools).  Extrude has been brought all the way back, including the contextual menu.

The subdivide tool now has a few advanced options in the Last Operator panel; you can enable the creation of triangles along single quad or triangle edges (it’s disabled by default) and configure the quad corner type again.  Unfortunately, as far as I know you can’t set default settings in 2.5 yet, so it won’t remember the previous settings.

The branch still isn’t testable, mostly because some editmesh tools remain.  The code that bridges editmesh and BMesh continuously breaks; and while I’m going to try to get it to at least somewhat work, I don’t have much faith in it at this point.  The good news is there’s not that many editmesh tools left, so simply bmeshafying them all shouldn’t take more then a few weeks.  Note that if you do decide to play around with the branch, I did add code to make blender save a [blendfile.blend].crash.blend on crashes, though it doesn’t save any changes you made in editmode (so cycling through editmode/objectmode every once in a while is a good idea).

I’m still not sure if BMesh will make it in to the first 2.5 release or not.  It’s definitely going to be feature-complete by then, but whether or not it’ll be stable enough I have no idea.  It may be necessary to include it anyway, regardless of how tested and stable it is, to avoid parallel development problems.

Donation goal reached

The donation goal was reached! Yay! The donations are really, really helpful (especially since my health has prevented me from working very many hours at my main job; I kindof try and get plenty of work done in bmesh instead, but anyway having money for eating is nice).  I now have money to move to a place where I can recover in the next few weeks (and do more bmesh coding ), which is a vast relief (it’s not fun watching your health get worse, and worse, and worse, and not being able to do anything about it).

Now I just need to make a page with the names of all the donators.  Feel free to bug me about this in comments if I put it off.

Bmeshafying EditMode

So, lately I’ve been bmeshafying (porting) various mesh editmode tools from the old structure (editmesh) to bmesh.  The goal is to have a set of stable, testable tools that are fully implemented in bmesh (remember that editmesh tools sortof work via an interface layer, they just aren’t really stable with respect to ngons.  The goal is to port everything to bmesh to avoid having a hackish hybrid design).

So far, I’ve done ctrl-n (not sure what it’s actually called, it makes normals point outside of an object), select more/less, l-key select,  hide/reveal, edge rotate, and a few others.  I’ve also fixed some bugs. Hopefully, I’ll have things ready for general testing in a couple of weeks.  Unfortunately, I’m not sure if loopcut will be done (this is being implemented by ton in the 2.5 branch, and I have to wait for his version because it involves UI coding).

Anyway, back to coding!

UVs

I’ve gotten UV texturing to (mostly) work with the new ngon data structures.  The UV editor and the unwrapping tools (and a few modifiers) all nicely work with UVs, and textured draw mode (though not GLSL yet) in editmode works.

Ngons even work with LCSM/ABF (the “unwrap” tool).  LCSM requires triangles anyway, so making the code support ngons instead of quads was just a matter of replacing the existing quad tessellation code with something that could handle ngon in general.  I used scanfill for this (the same library that handles shift-f, or filled curves), so the unwrapping might not always be completely correct, at least until I write some additional code to make scanfill produce nicer triangulations.

Subsurf doesn’t handle UVs though; I’ll probably put off making that work for a while, until I have time to really get into it.  It’s not hard in theory, but figuring out how to make the subsurf code do what I want may be difficult.

I’m considering stabilizing mesh editmode next, maybe port the remaining editmesh tools over to bmesh (or at least the important ones, remember the old tools do mostly work via a compatibility layer, they just aren’t completely stable, and the whole thing is rather hackish and unreliable).  After that I can finally have people start testing!  Hopefully I can attract additional help once I have artists posting nice demo vids.

Status Update

I’d like to thank everyone who’s been donating.  It’s been really encouraging.  I think maybe I’ll make a “Donators” page with everyone’s names on it.  If anyone wants a different name (e.g. maybe a handle) listed or prefer to remain anonymous, make sure to leave a comment (or email me).

Anyway, I’ve finished merging all the recent work in 2.5 into the bmesh branch.  Some of the new subdivision stuff that came from 2.5 looks interesting; there’s just one operator for it now; you can set the number of divisions, how smooth it is, and how fractalized it is, in the Last Operator tab (though this doesn’t work right, there’s some sort of bug in 2.5 at the moment with that, and it got merged over too).

Now that I’ve finished the merge (along with the associated maintenance and bugfixing that went with it), I can finish the bmesh versions of the array and mirror modifiers; at which point I can turn my attention to the UV and vertex color code.  My plan after that is to go through the mesh tools code and makes sure everything is usable (and perhaps port all the remaining editmesh tools to bmesh while I’m at it, it’s not like there’s that many of them left).

With any luck, the branch will actually be in a testable state after that!

Please Donate

For personal and health reasons, I have to move to another state.  This puts me in a difficult situation regarding BMesh development.  It would be a great help and aid my continued work on this project if I could raise $2000 USD.  If I can raise this money, I won’t have any problems finishing BMesh.

Any donations from people would be nice.  If my health tanks, I won’t be able to continue working on BMesh.  To be honest, my obsession with finishing it might survive, but it’d be at least a year, most likely more, before I could start again on the project.

Also, the donations I’ve already received are very much appreciated, they’ve been tremendously helpful.

For personal and health reasons, I have to move to another state.  This puts me in a difficult situation regarding BMesh development.  It would be a great help and aid my continued work on this project if I could raise $2000 USD.

Any donations from people would be nice.  If my health tanks, I won't be able to continue working on BMesh.  To be honest, my obsession with finishing it might survive, but it'd be at least a year, most likely more, before I could start again on the project.

Also, the donations I've already received are very much appreciated, they've been tremendously helpful.

Recurring Donate Links Up

I’ve put up some recurring donates links.  This is the first time I’ve done it, so I hope it works all right.  I’d suggest donators sign up for paypal accounts if they don’t have them.  PayPal is a little iffy on how you cancel subscriptions if you signed up without an account; I suspect you simply create one with the email address you used to donate and then you can access the subscriptions, but I’m not completely sure (if anyone feels like testing that, I’d really appreciate it ).

I should be able to cancel subscriptions from my end too, so if anyone has trouble they can just email me (you should get my email address as part of the donation checkout process).