Blender Institute
April 11, 2010 at 1:46 pm 30 comments
I’ve been honored recently to be hired by the Blender Institute to work on the Durian project. I’ll still be devoting some time to BMesh, as much as I can spare. I’m not sure what to do about donations; they would still go to BMesh (I’m only here for three months, after that it’s back to relying on donations), but I recognize that others may want their donations to produce immediate work (I certainly try to treat donations as an obligation to code now, not later). Because of this, I’ve decided that I will refund on request anyone who donates during the time I’m here at the Blender Institute, no questions asked.
This opportunity shouldn’t be seen as a threat to BMesh. I think I’ve proven I’m dedicated to finishing this project, given that this is the third time I’ve done it. And to be honest, I don’t think my professional career would survive if I did not. I strongly feel I entered into an implied contract the moment I went public with hemesh five years ago, and no matter how long it takes I will fulfill it.
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BMesh Integration Blog 
1.
ZanQdo | April 11, 2010 at 2:48 pm
You have more than proven your dedication to this project, I think you have more interest than anyone else on BMesh 🙂
Have a great time in Durian! I have commissioned venom to take you to beers for me!
2.
blenderificus | April 11, 2010 at 5:08 pm
enjoy your time at the institute. Thanks for all your hard work on blender throughout the years.
3.
Kemeros | April 12, 2010 at 5:33 am
Hope you have fun in Amsterdam 🙂
4.
Max Puliero | April 12, 2010 at 9:24 am
thankyou very much!
enjoy amsterdam!
5.
Jan | April 12, 2010 at 3:49 pm
That’s not cool! From the Blender Foundation!!
What are they thinking!
They will get this movie project finished anyway!
Who cares!
They should hire you to finish BMesh!
I’m _not_ happy with that!
6.
Le@ndro | April 12, 2010 at 8:14 pm
Oh, I am! I am very happy with the opportunity you were given! You deserved it, have a grate time there!!!
7.
vykelt | April 13, 2010 at 6:41 am
@Jan
actually they are VERY behind at the BI. Although BMesh is the most longed for 2.5 feature for a lot of us, there are some more critical features and bugfixes needed for Durian and a stable 2.5. I just hope they’re giving him some extra time to get a little Bmesh in, but we gotta look at the big picture and be patient.
Hope you’re loving it at the BI Joe.
8.
Marcus | April 13, 2010 at 2:36 pm
I would prefer Joe would work on Bmesh, but on the other hand he finally got what he deserves: to be hired for the great stuff he does. That means great benefit for Blender whatever he may be working on.
9.
jay | April 14, 2010 at 7:57 pm
Great news Joe, plus now you can pick Brecht’s brain in person for those tough Bmesh issues 😉
10.
Astap | April 14, 2010 at 11:41 pm
Good news dude. Congrats.
I hope you will be coming back to this project though. Its like the beating heart of blender’s future. For some people at least. And maybe not quite a heart, maybe something like a liver. You can still make it with out a liver but not for to long :).
At any rate good luck on your ventures.
11.
matty 686 | April 16, 2010 at 12:44 pm
we need b-mesh for god-sakes the Boolean modifiers don’t even cut clean holes in blender and modeling is awful because you always have to hand draw hundreds of triangles please work as hard as you possibly can to get b-mesh up to par with the SVN-Trunk when i tried your b-mesh release it had some bugs but the potential it gives for improving work-flow is amazing i especially loved the n-gons although they were slightly glitchy
12.
matty 686 | April 16, 2010 at 12:45 pm
oh yes good luck too
13.
lala | April 17, 2010 at 5:49 am
congrats, have fun. when u have to work on BMESH, here are few suggestions, i had a chance to test 2.5 beta 2 for few days and here are my suggestions..which will hopefully help to make it better and allow artists go get results with good speed…
1- improve knife / cut tool. unless it is similar to max or maya versions, its not going to help much. basically it works but the way it treat first and last edge / face, is not right. also snapping while cutting… and few other things..
2- most missing thing is, delete vertex without deleting edge
3- delete edge without deleting face…
offcourse 2 and 3 are when possible situation..
let me know if u want me to make video explaining / comparing it with other tools. i had been modeling in max maya for almost 10 years.
if all of these are solved, please give me few hints about how to do those…thanks..
btw: i wasn’t able to find what exactly beuatifill is how it works…
14.
joeedh | April 27, 2010 at 8:42 pm
All those things are planned, yes. The knife tool will be a combination of silo’a and maya’s, hopefully with things like face cutting and the like.
15.
stenosis | April 18, 2010 at 5:09 pm
have fun there and enjoy the time! 🙂
16.
Brad Cathey | April 20, 2010 at 4:19 am
No problems. Enjoy working on Sintel. BMesh can wait a little bit longer.
Congrats!
17.
ike | June 1, 2010 at 12:57 am
do you have another blog about things going on. I’d like to see short updates or blurbs on your progress with bmesh or you work in durian. I appreciate all the stuff your doing, which is why i get sad when there hasn’t been any updates in a while. anyways, thanks for the hard work
18.
vykelt | June 2, 2010 at 9:44 pm
@ike
I don’t know if joe has any other blogs but if you wanna see some of the things he’s doing, once or twice a day, go to
http://cia.vc/stats/project/Blender
It’s all the revisions to Blender and every once in a while you’ll see a flood of commits from joe.
19.
Chris | July 7, 2010 at 3:36 pm
Hi Joe, I read from durian blog that you came back at home. How are your plans about bmesh projects?
20.
Max Puliero | July 7, 2010 at 4:51 pm
news?
21.
nrk | July 15, 2010 at 2:15 am
Joe just did a huge bmesh commit…. Thanks Joe!
In it Joe said:
[note: do not test quite yet]
Phase 1 of restructuring done. There are now two
distinct subclass systems within the bmesh API;
one is compile-time, and forms the backend of what will
eventually be a “lite” bmesh API for modifiers (the
ones that use bmesh are simply too slow right now).
The other is dynamic, and will be used to implement
multires reprojection.
The idea was to solve as many serious problems with
memory, speed, etc, at once as possible and set up others
to be solved more easily later.
I’ve also added holes into the data structure, but not
the api; I don’t plan to finish implementing that until
after bmesh gets into trunk. I simply wanted to lessen
how much code I’ll have to rewrite, since I was doing a
fairly major restructuring anyway.
In addition, I’ve added iteration support to mempool, to
avoid having to store linked list pointers (though this
has caveats).
Next step: merge in trunk changes. . .oh, what fun 😛
22.
Max Puliero | July 15, 2010 at 2:52 am
🙂
goodluck!
23.
ike | July 17, 2010 at 8:26 am
thanks nrk
24.
nrk | July 22, 2010 at 2:03 am
Joe continues to rage away, it seems like he’s working on it full timer right now:
Commit by joeedh :: r30606 /branches/bmesh/blender/source/ (10 files in 6 dirs): (link)
[finally! the commit went through]
=bmesh=
First pass at post-merge stabilization. Seems to work well enough now, but
I need to do more testing. Also need to go through bmesh_class.h and make
sure the design/headers there make sense.
Great Job Joe!
25.
vykelt | July 22, 2010 at 4:11 am
yea, i haven’t seen him putting up any non-bmesh related stuff lately, i think you’re right. now that Ton’s got the boys down to bug fixing for the most part, i think he’s starting to get serious about bmesh implementation and oh my god i couldn’t be happier 😀
You can do it Joe!
26.
cryzz | July 22, 2010 at 6:48 pm
Joe, _please_ post a status update!
27.
nrk | July 23, 2010 at 2:18 am
Here’s what joe just said recently:
BMesh is nearing full completeness and stability, and I believe it can
be merged into trunk within one (at most two)
months. Since I’ve never had good success with posting testing builds
(as a way of getting serious user testing),
I’m going to get users to build/test it on IRC and hopefully have more
success at finding all the show-stopping
issues.
I’ll try to post some developer docs in the wiki; there’s a bunch of
comments in source/blender/bmesh/*.h and some
docs in bmesh/docs, but I need to consolidate and organize all the
information in a better way and fill in the gaps
still.
Once I have it fully ready, the merge itself will have to be scheduled
so it doesn’t interfere with a release (there are
always issues that only show up in trunk, when many more users start
using the code in real projects, so there
needs to be enough time to work those out before any release). One
potential issue is mesh RNA; the current RNA
mesh API is going to change, and I’m going to write an RNA api
wrapping bmesh as well. It should be
possible to write a wrapper .py module that emulates the current API,
to avoid having to totally rewrite the current
set of mesh scripts.
Anyway, feel free to look over the branch and ask questions, I’ll try
to be in IRC as much as possible. Questions will help me in making a
good set of dev documentation, that’s clear about why things are the
way they are.
Joe
28.
nrk | July 23, 2010 at 3:07 am
Joe, I wrote the cloud generator script in blender and the edit mesh python interface is really thin and hacky. Basically you generate arrays of verts and faces and then call mesh.from_pydata to create a mesh. I would be more than happy to revise my script to work with Bmesh, although others may disagree, but I for one have no problem with you making the python interface better for scripting. Also all of the scripts are maintained and stored in svn so you could revise them yourself for any changes you made although I for one would be glad to help.
29.
Le@ndro | July 23, 2010 at 3:39 am
Just made a donation there.
Go Joe! You’re awesome!!!
30.
dogwynn | August 20, 2010 at 3:14 pm
Grats!!