Notes for developer meeting 9 September 2019.
Announcements
- Buildbot now supports building arbitrary branches. Developers can use this to test their branch builds and passes tests on all platforms, and to make the branch available to users for testing. (docs) (Brecht Van Lommel)
New Features and Changes
Eevee
Soft shadows were redesigned and are now enabled with the “Use Soft Shadow” option in the render properties Shadow panel. This will progressively smooth shadows, in combination with a more conventional shadow filtering method (PCF). Exponential and Variance Shadow Mapping methods were removed. (details) (Clément Foucault)
This improves shadow accuracy, makes light and shadow setup simpler, and improves performance for soft shadows.
Bump mapping was changed to give more accurate results closer to Cycles. In particular it makes bump mapping with procedural textures work much better than before, at the cost of some performance.
Cycles
Reduced shadow terminator artifacts for bump mapping with diffuse BSDFs. (Lukas Stockner, Stefan Werner)
Shaders
New shader nodes for Cycles & Eevee. (Omar Ahmad)
- Noise Texture node: support 1D, 2D, and 4D noise.
- Mapping node: location, rotation and scale are now node inputs that can be linked to other nodes.
Viewport
Viewport shading changes to support look development with Cycles. (Jeroen Bakker)
- Rendered mode now has option to use HDRI studio lights instead of scene lights and world, for both Cycles and Eevee. This mode can now be used for look development.
- LookDev mode was renamed to Material Preview. This mode will be aimed at interactive texturing and fast preview with Eevee.
- HDRI studio light strength can now be controlled in the shading popover.
File Browser
The file Browser was redesigned. (details) (Julian Eisel, Brian Meisenheimer, William Reynish, Harley Acheson, Andrzej Ambroz)
- File Browser as floating window with more standard layout
- Popovers for view and filter options
- Importer/exporter options in panels in the sidebar
- Vertical list view with interactive column header
- New and updated icons
- More consistent and powerful mouse and keyboard shortcuts, including range select with shift click and extend select with ctrl click.
Rigging
- Armatures: bone inherit scale options (details) (Alexander Gavrilov)
- Full: inherit all effects of scale, like with enabled Inherit Scale.
- Fix Shear: removes shear from the final inherited transformation.
- Average: inherit uniform scale that represents the parent volume.
- None: completely remove scale and shear.
- None (Legacy): previous behavior for backwards compatibility.
- Constraints: better mixing modes for Copy Rotation and Copy Transform (Alexander Gavrilov)
- Replace: Replace the original transformation with copied
- Add: Add euler component values together
- Before Original: Apply copied transformation before original, as if the constraint target is a parent
- After Original: Apply copied transformation after original, as if the constraint target is a child
- Drivers: support decomposing rotation into swing followed by twist (details) (Alexander Gavrilov)
- Python API: constraints can now be reordered with
move()on objects and bones. (Alexander Gavrilov)
Other
- Image objects option to only show in side views (Campbell Barton)
- Grease Pencil (Antonio Vazquez, Charlie Jolly)
- Convert to strokes support for poly curves
- Viewport option to fade unselected objects.
- Improved guides display, with new Isometric option
- User Interface
- Select tool was renamed to Tweak tool. (William Reynish)
- Paint mode shortcuts: D for draw brush, B for blur brush. (William Reynish)
- Viewport navigation buttons are now positioned vertically.
- Batch rename now supports regular expression groups. (Jun Mizutani, Campbell Barton)
Projects Under Development
- (2.81) GPencil patches up for review still (D5688, D5707) (Antonioya, Brecht Van Lommel)
- (2.81) Potential UV patches (Sebastian Parborg, Phil Gosh, Brecht Van Lommel)
- (2.81) Potential DNA defaults patch (D4500) (Campbell Barton, Brecht Van Lommel)
- Add-ons
- Clean-up of add-ons repository: (T63750) (Brendon Murphy)
- X3D IO moved to community support, no longer maintained by the core team.
- In short: no maintainer = no entry.
- Speak up if there is an issue for you with this, see previous bullet item.
- Crashes with Python frame change handlers are being worked on, which requires some internal redesign. (T60094) (Sergey Sharybin, Brecht Van Lommel)
Next meeting
Next meeting Next online meeting is on Monday, 16 September 18:00 CEST / 16:00 UTC. It will be on #blender-coders on blender.chat. (details)