29 November 2021
Notes for weekly communication of ongoing projects and modules.
Announcements
- Blender 3.0 is now in bcon4. The release will happen on December 3, 2021.
- Code architecture documentation planned for December.
- Thomas Dinges announced a weekly open chat, where (new) developers and people who want to get involved can ask questions.
Modules & Projects
Asset Browser
- Standard list of catalog UUIDs documented in the wiki.
Geometry Nodes
- 2021-11-22 - 2021-11-26 Geometry Nodes Sub-Module Meetings
- The initial list of 3.1 targets has settled, and is tracked in this task: ⚓ T93203 Geometry Nodes 3.1 Targets
New Features and Changes
Geometry Nodes
- Node execution time overlay (commit) (Erik Abrahamsson)
- Performance improvements
- Improve multi-threading for medium sized geometries (commit, commit) (Jacques Lucke)
- Reduce overhead with many nodes (commit, commit, commit, commit) (Jacques Lucke)
- Optimize the Set Position node (commit) (Jacques Lucke)
- Optimize Cube primitive vertex location calculation (commit) (Erik Abrahamsson)
- Parallelize the Set Spline Type node (commit) (Erik Abrahamsson)
Animation
- Allow manually setting the intended playback range for actions (commit) (Alexander Gavrilov)
- Allow marking actions as cyclic for Cycle-Aware Keying (commit) (Alexander Gavrilov)
Mask Editor
- Draw the active mask layer on top (commit) (Simon Lenz)
Cycles
- Expose direct light sampling option in Debug panel, tweak panel layout (commit) (Brecht Van Lommel)
User Interface
- Improve scaling of widgets when zooming (commit) (Leon Leno)
- Change the icon used for Blender files without preview thumbnails (commit) (Harley Acheson)
- Replace .blend file icons, add “Current File” icon (commit) (Julian Eisel)
- Performance improvements
- Significantly increase the performance with many UI elements like nodes (commit) (Erik Abrahamsson)
Asset Browser
- Catalog drag and drop
- Asset library indexing for improved performance (currently disabled) (commit) (Jeroen Bakker)
- Add operator for installing asset bundles (commit) (Sybren A. Stüvel)
- Generate light preview when making light object an asset (commit) (Julian Eisel)
Painting
- Performance improvements
- Increase speed of generating curve masks by 2-5x (commit) (Jeroen Bakker)