New Features and Changes
The focus continues to be on bugfixing and polishing 2.80, with about 75 bugs fixed last week.
- Wireframe display mode now supports object and random coloring of the wireframes. (Clément Foucault)
- Subdivision surface animation playback performance was significantly improved. This is still done on the CPU, but multithreaded and caching topology that does not change between frames. (Sergey Sharybin)
- Peak memory usage when loading large .blend files was reduced, particularly when using only parts of a linked library. (Campbell Barton)
- The transform adjust operation panel was simplified, so it’s easier to edit values when using constraints. (Campbell Barton)
- In the timeline, Ctrl + Home/End now set the start/end frame. (Campbell Barton)
- Editor corner was improved with a larger hit zone and new cursors to show the operation. (Harley Acheson)
- Cycles OpenCL kernel compilation was further optimized. For our tests scenes times are now within the 15s - 21s range, down from 55s - 210s a few weeks ago. In some cases render time is also reduced. (Jeroen Bakker)
Development
- 2.8 homestretch workshop planned in April, to get developers together in Amsterdam and discuss user feedback, designs and planning for 2.80 and beyond. (announcement).