13 May 2024

Announcements Weekly Updates
1

13 May 2024
Notes for weekly communication of ongoing projects and modules.

Welcomes

  • Bart van der Braak started this week as DevOps engineer:

Hi, I’m Bart van der Braak! Today’s my first day as a DevOps Engineer at Blender. I’m originally from Amsterdam, but I’ve lived in Zaandam for most of my life. I have been getting to know the team, setting up tools and access, and diving into the projects I’ll be taking on. Current focus is on improving the provisioning/migration of services, as well as enhancing our CI/CD processes. Excited to get started!

  • Sean Kim got commit access to Blenders code repository.

Announcements

Modules & Projects

New Features and Changes

This is a selection of changes that happened over the last week. For a full overview including fixes, code only changes and more visit projects.blender.org.

Anim

  • Run bezier handle calculation in parallel (commit) - (Christoph Lendenfeld)
  • Add failure propagation to more lower-level keying functions (commit) - (Nathan Vegdahl)
  • Include “Only Key Available” in derived auto-keying flags (commit) - (Nathan Vegdahl)

Compositor

  • Remove Two Pass option (commit) - (Sergey Sharybin)
  • Remove Render/Edit Quality setting (commit) - (Sergey Sharybin)

Cycles

  • Add OpenImageDenoise quality option (commit) - (Attila Áfra)
  • Enable OIDN 2.3 lazy device module loading (commit) - (Attila Áfra)
  • MetalRT optimisations (scene_intersect_shadow + random_walk) (commit) - (Michael Jones)
  • Select Metal compute device by default on Apple Silicon machines (commit) - (Michael Jones)

EEVEE Next

  • Fixing sun shadows in ortho camera (commit) - (Vitaljok)
  • Disable TILE_COPY shadow update method (commit) - (Jason Fielder)
  • Optimize closure light stack array access (commit) - (Jason Fielder)
  • Improve shadow tracing (commit) - (Clément Foucault)
  • Remove shadow softness factor parameter (commit) - (Clément Foucault)
  • Make volume light-probe surfel density scale dependant (commit) - (Clément Foucault)
  • Rename engines and set it default in startup file (commit) - (Clément Foucault)
  • Make Specular BSDF work (commit) - (Clément Foucault)
  • Compute maximum safe trace distance for sun shadow (commit) - (Clément Foucault)
  • Add operator to convert a world volume to mesh (commit) - (Jeroen Bakker)
  • Limit cost of transmission evaluation (commit) - (Clément Foucault)

GPv3

  • Support layer group selection (commit) - (Pratik Borhade)
  • Add layer inside active layer group (commit) - (Pratik Borhade)
  • Drag & drop for layer groups (commit) - (Pratik Borhade)
  • Snap operators for edit mode (commit) - (Lukas Tönne)

Geometry Nodes

  • Add implicit input for Instance Transform (commit) - (Iliya Katueshenock)
  • New Input Rotation node (commit) - (Iliya Katueshenock)
  • Use aligned sockets in bake node (commit) - (Jacques Lucke)
  • Show info in simulation node when it is baked (commit) - (Jacques Lucke)
  • Sample Grid Index node (commit) - (Hans Goudey)
  • New Axes to Rotation node (commit) - (Jacques Lucke)
  • Output transform matrix from object info node (commit) - (Jacques Lucke)
  • Support matrix in Transform Geometry node (commit) - (Jacques Lucke)

IO

  • Use file handler in space VSE (commit) - (Guillermo Venegas)
  • Use panels for Alembic, OBJ, PLY, and STL (commit) - (Jesse Yurkovich)

Mesh

  • Speedup BKE_mesh_validate (commit) - (Aras Pranckevicius)

Modeling

  • Pixel perfect Suzanne UV map (commit) - (Hallam Roberts)

Nodes

  • Add node group description (commit) - (Jacques Lucke)
  • Reorganize node group properties UI (commit) - (Jacques Lucke)
  • Add color tag to node groups (commit) - (Jacques Lucke)

Object

  • Add Shade Auto Smooth operator (commit) - (Jacques Lucke)

PyAPI

  • Expose Region.tag_refresh_ui (commit) - (Campbell Barton)
  • Expose the popup region in the context (commit) - (Campbell Barton)

UI

  • Optional Complex Layout for Workspace Status (commit) - (Harley Acheson)
  • Status Bar While Menus Are Open (commit) - (Harley Acheson)
  • Increase precision of the camera’s focus distance (commit) - (Campbell Barton)
  • Edit Mesh Inset Faces Status Display (commit) - (Harley Acheson)
  • Edit Mesh Knife Status Display (commit) - (Harley Acheson)
  • Allow displaying grid views in popups (commit) - (Julian Eisel)
  • Respect fixed layout width in grid view layout calculations (commit) - (Julian Eisel)
  • Edge Slide Status Display (commit) - (Harley Acheson)
  • Set the context’s menu on creation (commit) - (Campbell Barton)
  • Improved overlay text contrast with new outline text decoration (commit) - (Aras Pranckevicius)
  • Add eyedropper button to camera focus distance (commit) - (Falk David)
  • Sequencer Overlays layout improvements (commit) - (Pablo Vazquez)

USD Export

  • Adding the ability to choose Stage Up Axis at export time. (commit) - (Charles Wardlaw)

VSE

  • Text shadow blur / outline (commit) - (Aras Pranckevicius)
  • Make strip translate/grab tool round resulting position (commit) - (Aras Pranckevicius)
  • Optimize text shadow blur / outline options (commit) - (Aras Pranckevicius)

Weekly Reports

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