Notes for meeting of Monday, 30 March 2020. 18:00 CEST / UTC 16:00 on #blender-coders on blender.chat.
Announcements
- Google Summer of Code students deadline is March 31st, don’t miss the deadline.
- blender.chat server will be updated Monday (march 30th) night.
Communication
- Dalai Felinto suggests “threaded discussions” to be brought back to blender.chat with the update. It helps 1:1 discussions to happen in the public open channels.
- Also he will try to post on #blender-coders more often the outcome of the talk with the other developers (e.g., a compilation of the daily report of activity by the developers).
- As a rule of thumb all the developers are heavily encouraged to use the open channels as much as possible (as oppose to private messages).
Other
- Germano Calvalcante insists a 2.82b release would be benefitial. He will post on bf-committers about that.
New Features and Changes
Sculpt
- New Surface Smooth brush and mesh filter, to smooth surfaces and remove detail without losing volume. (Pablo Dobarro)
- Push Brush: option to set IK segments position and weights based on face sets. (Pablo Dobarro)
- Brushes: weight normal and area sampling towards the brush center. (Pablo Dobarro)
- Face Sets: create from mesh connectivity, material slots, face normals, UV seams, creases, sharp edges, bevel weights, face maps, and edit mode selection. (Pablo Dobarro)
Render
- Eevee: alpha hash support for hair, for more accurate shadows and transparency. (Joe Eagar)
- Overlays: more accurate wireframe rendering in the viewport. (Clément Foucault)
- Cycles: fix OpenCL performance regressions from recent releases. (Brecht Van Lommel, Jeroen Bakker)
Modifier
- Solidify:
- Improve material handling in complex mode. (Henrik Dick)
- Option to assign shell & rim geometry to selected vertex groups. (Cody Winchester)
- Surface Deform: add vertex group and strength control. (Cody Winchester)
- Vertex Weight Edit: add invert curve falloff option. (Cody Winchester)
- Warp: add bone from and bone to options when using armature objects. (Cody Winchester)
- Subivision and Multires: enable optimal display by default. (Sergey Sharybin)
User Interface
- New Blender > System menu, with operators for technical users and developers. (Campbell Barton)
- Theme options for checkerboard pattern colors and size (Michael Soluyanov)
- Support unicode character display independent of translation. (Brecht Van Lommel)
- Experimental option to include menu items in operator search. (Campbell Barton)
- Add View Layer now has options New, Copy and Blank (all collections disabled). (Chris Clyne)