Blender Developers meeting notes, January 22, 2017

A performance update to Blender 2.78 will be released this week - including the amazing 10x Cycles rendering speedup!

Ton writes:

Why do we need such a release?

Fair enough question is why do we make such a release. The answer here is
that we've been working hard on getting various things optimised in Blender. Some
work was done in collaboration with other developers from various companies
and studio and they will be more than happy to see this release. Will keep them
motivated to stay around as well!

Since the upcoming 2.79 release will take at least 2 months to release
since now it's easier and faster just to cherry-pick all the performance commits from
master branch on top blender-2.78-release branch.

Read the full update about this release here.

1) Blender 2.78b update

• As mailed to this list yesterday; we will release a performance (speed) update for 2.78a. A new build can be made available within a week. Here is the branch.
• An open issue is still a much anticipated Nvidia Cuda 8.0 update (for Windows 10 especially). According to Nvidia the official release would happen this week though. Stay tuned for updates.

2) Blender 2.79 release targets

• An overview of current targets is here:
  https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.7
• Filmic Blender has not officially been submitted for review, we'll ask Troy Sobotka about it.
  It's in github though: https://github.com/sobotka/filmic-blender
  Main issue seems to be that the filmic OCIO files break compatibility.
• Shadow catcher for Cycles is nearly done, will be wrapped up.

3) Blender 2.8

• Viewport team is a bit behind with coordination. Suggested is to have a dedicated irc meeting.
  Dalai Felinto will do a call and schedule a good moment. Join the viewport list here:
  https://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-viewport

4) Other topics

• The developer.blender.org website will be upgraded tomorrow ("Phabricator"). Special attention will
  go to preventing spambots to post there.

Regards,

-Ton-