2 September 2019

Announcements Weekly Updates
1

Notes for meeting of 2 September 2019.

Announcements

  • Julian Eisel is now working full time for Blender in a 4 month contract.
  • Nathan Lovato (gdquest) has been granted commit access to contribute Power Sequencer: video editing tools in the add-ons repository.
  • The patches for the sculpt branch are finished, except for the transform tool. (Pablo Dobarro)
  • We started to organize “mentorship” tasks for developers - T69403 and T69399. (Campbell Barton)
  • These tasks will be readable by everyone, but writable by the developers only, as a way to keep the conversation between the involved parts without too much noise, while keeping our communication open for the public . (Dalai Felinto)
  • Shadow refactor for EEVEE is ready for review. (Clément Foucault)
  • We have a landing page and a corresponding tag for all our modules now. (Dalai Felinto)
  • Today is the last day of the Google Summer of Code. Final students report will be made public soon. (Dalai Felinto)

New Features and Changes

Sculpt and Retopology

  • Sculpt cursor follows the surface normal and displays symmetry. (Pablo Dobarro)
  • Normal radius setting for sculpt tools, to control how sensitive the sculpt normal direction is to the underlying surface. (Pablo Dobarro)
  • World spacing option for brush strokes, to keep an even distance between stroke points in 3D space. (Pablo Dobarro)
  • Poly build tool improvements for retopology. (video) (Pablo Dobarro)
    • Click and drag from a boundary edge extrudes a new quad.
    • Click and drag on vertices tweaks the position.
    • Ctrl + click adds geometry, with geometry preview and automatic creation of quads.
    • Shift + click deletes mesh elements (faces or vertices).

81_polybuild
81_polybuild1246×625 94.7 KB

Rendering

  • Cycles adaptive subdivision and displacement now stitches faces to avoid cracks between edges. (Mai Lavelle)
  • Eevee shader compilation was optimized to only parse the required shader node code. (Omar Ahmad, Brecht Van Lommel)

cycles_displacement_cracks
cycles_displacement_cracks900×450 294 KB

Transform

  • When auto merging vertices, adjacent edges and faces can now be automatically split to avoid overlapping geometry. This is controlled by the new “Split Edges & Faces” option for Auto Merge. (Germano Cavalcante)

81_auto_merge_split

  • Transform parent without children option added. (Campbell Barton)
  • Origin edit can now be toggled with ctrl . (Campbell Barton)

Batch Rename

Where you could previously rename the active item with F2, you can now also batch rename all selected items with Alt F2. (Campbell Barton)

  • Find & replace, with regular expressions
  • Set, prefix or suffix
  • Strip characters
  • Change capitalization

Other

  • Grease Pencil (Antonio Vazquez)
    • Switch active layer automatically when selecting keyframes in the dopesheet.
    • Opacity modifier gained a Strength mode, to use the strength of the stroke instead of the alpha channel of the material.
  • Constraints (Alexander Gavrilov)
    • Copy Scale: option to copy non-uniform scale as uniform.
    • Copy Rotation: option to explicitly specify the Euler order used during copy.
    • Transform: options to explicitly specify the input and output Euler order.
  • Drivers: option to override the Euler order and access quaternion values for driver variables. (Alexander Gavrilov)
  • User Interface:
    • Support joining areas that are not exactly aligned. (Harley Acheson)
    • Various layout improvements for popup dialogs. (Yevgeny Makarov)
    • Outliner alphabetical sorting now uses more natural sorting of numbers. (Harley Acheson)
  • Workbench matcaps can now be multilayer OpenEXR images with separate diffuse and specular layers. The layer named diffuse will be affected by material, texture or random colors, while specular will not. (Jeroen Bakker)

Demonstrating_Multi-layered_Matcaps_(Image_from_Pablo_Dobarro)
Demonstrating_Multi-layered_Matcaps_(Image_from_Pablo_Dobarro)1360×1024 301 KB

Projects Under Development

  • Cycles Optix is almost ready to be merged as an experimental feature. It’s only waiting to resolve a license issue so it can be built without having to install the Optix SDK. (Patrick Mours, Brecht Van Lommel)
  • Buildbot is being worked on, to support building official releases and arbitrary branches. (Brecht Van Lommel)
  • Release Cycle page was updated with more details on each Bcon phase and branching.

Weekly Progress Reports

Blender Today Live Stream

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