4 May 2020

Announcements Weekly Updates
1

Notes for meeting of Monday, 4 May 2020. 11:00 CEST / UTC 9:00 on #blender-coders on blender.chat.

Announcements

  • Google Summer of Code official announcement of projects today at 20h30 CEST on bf-committers mailing-list.
  • Christian Rauch’s has been added as a committer to develop GHOST/Wayland support (now in master). Welcome!

Google Summer of Code

  • The list of accepted students will be in the https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/GSoC/2020.
  • In coming weeks this will be filled with links to students’ proposals.
  • New (public) blender.chat channel for mentors and students to be created #gsoc-2020.
  • Students will need help setting up git/wiki accounts.
  • Communication can happen in the specific module channels if too noisy for #blender-coders.
  • Devtalk is also important for students to post their reports and father feedback.

2.83

  • There are way too many unclassified reports - 117, 5 of which are high priority - module owners and members at the very least check if there are high priority issues among them.
  • There are 22 to 26 high priority issues at the moment.
  • Brecht Van Lommel will work on Cycles/render related issues and review fixes from Richard Antalík.
  • There are plenty of graphics card issues that Clément Foucault and Jeroen Bakker can help.
  • There are also a few sculpting issues for Pablo Dobarro.
  • Besides the other issues.
  • bcon4 is next week!

LTS

  • There is almost no time to implement Blender side changes for 2.83.
  • A proposal is still under discussion internally among Ton Roosendaal, Francesco Siddi and Dalai Felinto, to be presented as soon as possible for feedback and final deliberations.

New Features and Changes

Blender 2.90

  • Performance: faster animation playback of complex rigs on computers with many CPU cores. Dependency graph scheduling and many other areas in Blender are now using Intel TBB. In benchmarks with animation production files from Agent 237 and Spring short movies, FPS was increased by 35-40%. (Brecht Van Lommel, Jeroen Bakker)
  • Multiresolution Sculpting:
    • Restore support for switching between levels in sculpt mode. (Sergey Sharybin)
    • Subdivide Simple and Subdivide Linear operators, to use simple subdivision for some levels with Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces. (Pablo Dobarro)
    • Unsubdivide and Rebuild Subdivisions operators: to reconstruct the base mesh and displacement from a mesh with subdivision and displacement applied. This can be used to import meshes from other software, or meshes where the subdivision surface or multires modifier was applied. (Pablo Dobarro)
  • Motion Tracking: new distortion model compatible with Nuke and Natron. (Sergey Sharybin)
  • Armatures: select linked operator that uses selection rather than cursor position, with Ctrl+L shortcut. (Philipp Oeser)
  • Video Sequencer: speed effect option for frame interpolation using cross blending. (Israel Medina)
  • User Interface:
    • Improve readability of statistics in 3D viewport. (Harley Acheson)
    • Search now includes raw operators in addition to menu items, if Developer Extras is enabled. (Campbell Barton)
    • Outliner delete operator now works on both collections and objects with the same shortcut. (Nathan Craddock)
    • Grease Pencil quick access to set active material in the context (right-click) menu and with the U shortcut. (Antonio Vazquez)
  • Linux: initial Wayland support, when building the WITH_GHOST_WAYLAND option. Some features are still missing in this implementation and X11 remains used by default for now. (Christian Rauch, Campbell Barton)
  • Windows: Blender daily builds now include minimal debug symbols and print backtraces on crashes, to help bug triaging and fixing. (Ray Molenkamp)

Weekly Reports

8 Likes