8 June 2020

Announcements Weekly Updates
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Notes for meeting of Monday, 8 June 2020. 18:00 CEST / UTC 16:00 on #blender-coders on blender.chat.

Announcements

Blender 2.83

  • Snap (Linux distribution platform) issue, already fixed, and new build deployed.
  • The number of reported bugs doubled last week.

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  • Jeroen Bakker is the contact point for 2.83.1, even if it is still a corrective release, more than part of the life-cycle of LTS itself.
  • There is no showstopper for a corrective release yet, although there are issues that will make 2.83.1 worth having. Agreement is to wait another week to decide.

Blender 2.90

  • This week the modules should have their roadmaps confirmed.
  • Dalai Felinto will mail bf-committers with a compilation of the topics once it is all ready.
  • Dalai Felinto also suggests moving all the module information to the project page and its workboard, he will present this to the module owners.

For example the Motion Tracking would look like this:

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Google Summer of Code

  • Ray Molenkamp is maintaining builds for all the GSoC branches, as long as there is a feedback thread on devtalk for them.

More students shared a one-line pitch of their project. More next week.

  • Alexia Legrand (Tempo): I’m working on custom menus so the user can create their own menus.
  • Mateusz Grzeliński (grzelins): I am working on making info editor more useful mostly for developers.
  • Nathan Craddock (natecraddock): I’m continuing last year’s outliner project by adding a few medium-sized features like custom sorting and connection to properties editor tabs.

New Features and Changes

Blender 2.90

Performance

  • Undo: reduce undo memory usage and make undo faster when adding, removing and renaming objects. (Bastien Montagne)
  • Viewport: multithread mesh GPU batch computation. This helps improve animation playback with multiple animated meshes, for example increasing FPS 1.15x in a Spring production scene. (Jeroen Bakker)
  • Modifiers: more efficient multithreading of modifiers using BVH lookups like the shrinkwrap modifier. Increased animation playback FPS 1.1x in one Settlers production scene. (Jeroen Bakker)

User Interface

  • Modifiers are now displayed as panels, with support for drag & drop and quick collapse and expand. The user interface layout of all modifiers was revamped to use subpanels, to conform to single column layout, and to use a more logical organization. (Hans Goudey, William Reynish, Julian Eisel)
  • Color Picker: support sampling colors from other Blender windows. (Germano Cavalcante)

Other

  • Cycles:
    • OptiX support is now enabled on all NVIDIA GPUs that support it, which is Maxwell or higher (GeForce 700, 800, 900, 1000 series). (Patrick Mours)
    • NVLink support for CUDA and Optix. When enabled in the Cycles device preferences, GPUs connected with an NVLink bridge will share memory to support rendering bigger scenes. (Patrick Mours)
  • Grease Pencil: support selection by filled areas instead of only strokes on the border. (Antonio Vazquez)
  • Sculpt: improved twist axis computation with Pose Brush FK mode. (Pablo Dobarro)
  • Overrides: support for overriding properties of modifiers, constraints and cameras. (Bastien Montagne)

Weekly Reports

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