New Features and Changes
About 130 bugs were fixed in the last week.
- Subdivision surface performance when transforming in edit mode was improved. The topology is now cached for faster updates. Performance of editing topology is still not as fast as before, however. (Sergey Sharybin)
- Cycles CUDA render performance has been improved by 5-20% on production scenes, due to better thread scheduling. (Stefan Werner)
- Cycles OpenCL viewport render now shows an ambient occlusion preview render until the kernels are fully compiled, to keep the viewport interactive. Kernel re-compilation on changes is needed less often as more features are always enabled. (Jeroen Bakker)
- Shader node editor: panels with light and world settings in the sidebar, as was already available for materials. (Brecht Van Lommel)
- Preferences: new settings to display factors as percentages throughout the user interface. (Jacques Lucke)
- Help > Report Bug now automatically fills the bug reporting form with system and Blender info, we recommend users to use this for complete and accurate info. (Ray Molenkamp)
- Windows builds now include batch files for easily running Blender with debug log output. The resulting log files can be attached to bug reports. (Ray Molenkamp)
- X3D add-on: now available in 2.8 again. (Bastien Montagne)
- Python API: there is now an API for add-ons to register tools in the toolbar. Example code is available as a template in the text editor. (Campbell Barton)
- Python API:
ShaderNodeCustomGroupwas added to define custom node groups for Cycles and Eevee. Works the same as existingNodeCustomGroup. (Miguel Porces)
Development
- Cycles now uses CUDA toolkit 10.1 as the officially supported version, we recommend upgrading for best performance and stability.
- In the bug tracker, developers are encouraged to look also at older reports marked as Need Information or Need Triangle. Also to mark important older bugs as high priority so they get attention.