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*The meeting will be open for anyone interested in joining the video call (link below).*

Meeting time: 15:00-16 CET (Your local time: [date=2023-04-04 time=15:00:00 timezone="Europe/Amsterdam"])

## Links

* [Video Call](https://meet.google.com/krh-kvcb-gkm)
* [Calendar](webcal://calendar.google.com/calendar/ical/c_sgrltho8b5rq3cktkqo001bt2k%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics)
* [Chat Channel](https://blender.chat/channel/geometry-nodes)

## Present
* Lukas Tönne
* Miro Horvath
* Falk David
* Iliya Katueshenock
* Hans Goudey
* Jacques Lucke
* Dalai Felinto

## Since the Last Meeting
* The team spent most of its time in the final phase of bug fixing for Blender 3.5, and working on simulation nodes.
* Lukas implemented a [prototype](https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/106309) of the realtime clock, and made a particle system demo
* Hans worked on more mesh performance improvements, mostly by [skipping](https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/commit/00bb30c0e96) the unnecessary [loose geometry](https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/commit/63689e47562) and [bounds](https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/commit/59c0e19db26) computations.
    * The storage of mesh face corners has been [made generic](https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/commit/16fbadde363) too, giving slight improvements in performance across the board.
    * Alexander Revkov also contributed [an improvement](https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/commit/a1f52a02a87) to skip computing bounding boxes for primitive meshes.
* Leon has been prototyping a [UX change](https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/105457) to simplify the process of working with frame nodes. That is being discussed in [a thread](https://devtalk.blender.org/t/testing-wanted-for-joining-nodes-into-frames/28241) here.
* Erik has been making progress on the SDF volume implementation in a branch, and recently looked at making the existing "Mesh to Volume" node [more consistent](https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/106346).
* Looking farther into the future, Jacques and Hans continued improvements to the [index mask](https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/104629) data structure, and Jacques has continued working on large memory usage [improvements](https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/106228) for geometry. 
* There is now [a dropdown](https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/commit/e7f395dd206dcd46ff9d8e89682b33cd9e95abe7) that makes it possible to select the UI subtype for built in socket types.
* Iliya [finished](https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/commit/9726e4a0adb30e452327866aae1af7316ac0e0ab) a UX improvement for link-drag-search to move data-block default values
* "Color Ramp" is [now](https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/commit/c971adfeefb) two words in the UI.

## General Discussion
* GDC report from Dalai
    * Lots of positivity and ideas about integration with geometry nodes
    * It might be good to have a more official presence there next year
* [#106497: Geometry Nodes: Freeze Node](https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/issues/106497)
    * The difficulties of developing the freeze node (checkpoint/edit mode node in the past) overlap with the development of simulation caching
    * Developing them separately would even be easier, and allow users to separate the concerns too.
    * Can the freeze node be inside the simulation loop?
        * Technically yes, but the behavior might not be useful
    * The animation frame range should be separate from the scene frame range, or at least that should be an option.
    * A downside is that the freeze node would be required for most simulations. Keeping them separate for now simplifies the design too though.
    * How would this transition to become the "Edit Geometry" node that allows manual edits in edit/sculpt mode
        * The node would have to be renamed and some features would be added
        * On the data-block level this would be trickier, but eventually the node might have pointers to various geometry data-blocks in the main database.
        * For animated bakes, there would be a mesh/point cloud data-block per frame in the .blend file.
    * Eventually the automatic cache should be able to replace some uses of this node. People will "un-learn" using the freeze node in the future.
    * The node has a float input for the frame to support substeps for motion blur. The baking/freezing operation should have options for how many substeps you want to bake.
    * Storing the cache per original node vs. per modifier is an important design consideration, that should be addresssed with some sort of pros/cons list.
    * How does the node deal with anonymous attributes? Which anonymous attributes should be baked?
        * When the geometry is frozen, all anonymous attributes might not be included. We would have to tell the user that not all anonymous attributes are included in the bake.
        * It would be nice to bake used anonymous attributes implicitly, rather than requiring connecting all anonymous attributes to the freeze node manually.

## Pull Requests
* [#106346: WIP: Mesh To Volume fixes / refactoring](https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/106346)
    * Not much to talk about here actually. Jacques gave some feedback on the patch and in chat.
* [#104619: Geometry Node: Index of Nearest](https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/104619)
    * Naming needs a bit of work, then code review can continue.
    * "Self Group ID" and "Nearest Group ID" work well
    * "Index of Nearest" rather than "Index Of Nearest"

## Next Meeting
The next meeting will be on Tuesday April 18, 15:00-16 CET (Your local time: [date=2023-04-18 time=15:00:00 timezone="Europe/Amsterdam"] ), which is 2 weeks from this meeting. The provisional meeting agenda will be linked in the [#nodes-physics-module](https://blender.chat/channel/nodes-physics-module) channel before the meeting.