NOTE: While most of the milestone 1 goals are there, a few smaller features and
improvements are still to be done.
Big picture of this milestone: Initial, OpenXR-based virtual reality support
for users and foundation for advanced use cases.
Maniphest Task: https://developer.blender.org/T71347
The tasks contains more information about this milestone.
To be clear: This is not a feature rich VR implementation, it's focused on the
initial scene inspection use case. We intentionally focused on that, further
features like controller support are part of the next milestone.
- How to use?
Instructions on how to use this are here:
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Severin/GSoC-2019/How_to_Test
These will be updated and moved to a more official place (likely the manual) soon.
Currently Windows Mixed Reality and Oculus devices are usable. Valve/HTC
headsets don't support the OpenXR standard yet and hence, do not work with this
implementation.
---------------
This is the C-side implementation of the features added for initial VR
support as per milestone 1. A "VR Scene Inspection" Add-on will be
committed separately, to expose the VR functionality in the UI. It also
adds some further features for milestone 1, namely a landmarking system
(stored view locations in the VR space)
Main additions/features:
* Support for rendering viewports to an HMD, with good performance.
* Option to sync the VR view perspective with a fully interactive,
regular 3D View (VR-Mirror).
* Option to disable positional tracking. Keeps the current position (calculated
based on the VR eye center pose) when enabled while a VR session is running.
* Some regular viewport settings for the VR view
* RNA/Python-API to query and set VR session state information.
* WM-XR: Layer tying Ghost-XR to the Blender specific APIs/data
* wmSurface API: drawable, non-window container (manages Ghost-OpenGL and GPU
context)
* DNA/RNA for management of VR session settings
* `--debug-xr` and `--debug-xr-time` commandline options
* Utility batch & config file for using the Oculus runtime on Windows.
* Most VR data is runtime only. The exception is user settings which are saved
to files (`XrSessionSettings`).
* VR support can be disabled through the `WITH_XR_OPENXR` compiler flag.
For architecture and code documentation, see
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Source/Interface/XR.
---------------
A few thank you's:
* A huge shoutout to Ray Molenkamp for his help during the project - it would
have not been that successful without him!
* Sebastian Koenig and Simeon Conzendorf for testing and feedback!
* The reviewers, especially Brecht Van Lommel!
* Dalai Felinto for pushing and managing me to get this done ;)
* The OpenXR working group for providing an open standard. I think we're the
first bigger application to adopt OpenXR. Congratulations to them and
ourselves :)
This project started as a Google Summer of Code 2019 project - "Core Support of
Virtual Reality Headsets through OpenXR" (see
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Severin/GSoC-2019/).
Some further information, including ideas for further improvements can be found
in the final GSoC report:
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Severin/GSoC-2019/Final_Report
Differential Revisions: D6193, D7098
Reviewed by: Brecht Van Lommel, Jeroen Bakker
It makes no sense to load add-ons here, we already do that (in a more
complete way) in load_addons test, this is only adding overhead and
doubling code to maintain).
Also do not try to load-as-modules add-ons that are not 2.8-ready, and
some other misc fix.
load_py_modules test should be passing again now.
Thanks to @sergey who did part of the work here as well.
This could make output really polluted, where it'll be hard to see actual
issues.
It is still possible to have all backtraces printed using BLENDER_VERBOSE
environment variable.
It tried to assert that
addons/io_blend_utils/blender_bam-unpacked.whl/__init__.py was loaded when
the io_blend_utils module was imported. However, this happens only on
demand, and not directly when importing the add-on.
- scripts that execute directly need to include their basedir in the sys.path
- modules which are in a directory without an __init__.py weren't importing.
Recent addons commit meant that addons would be enabled even if they weren't found.
This would give an error (which is fine), but also remove from preferences.
Too many contrib addons are in an unstable state making the test not so useful.
Thanks to Sergey initial patch: D1012, redid mostly - but outcome is the same.
