Blender SVN Development Updates

Terry Wallwork likes to keep a close eye on the changes in Blender code by reading the SVN commits (see his Google+ page). Because of their sheer volume and often cryptical descriptions, it's difficult for most of us to make sense of those. Terry is going to take a stab at providing a periodic update on commits that caught his eye.

Terry writes:

Blender is a very advanced piece of 3D modeling software that is open source. This means that the code and resources which underlay Blender's functionality is freely available to all those interested in seeing how it works. This results in quite frequent additions and modifications to Blender's source code, resulting in new features and changes to Blender happening at a rapid rate.

To keep track of all those changes and updates to source code of Blender a tracking system called SVN (Subversion) is used. Every time a change is made to Blender's source code, SVN will update on a mailing listen detailing the changes, and the people responsible for those changes will usually leave a simple log message describing what a particular change achieves.

There are usually many of these changes per day in Blender's code, mostly they concern small changes which are needed because of bugs that have been found, but every so often entirely new features are added to code or the code is updated to change the way older features work and perform. All these updates result in many SVN update messages being sent to the mailing list, so many that it can be difficult to keep track of important updates.

So Blender Nation owner Bart came up with the idea of making an article which periodically took a snap shot of the most important/interesting updates to Blender code and presenting them in ways that are understandable to most Blender users rather than Blender Developers.

Please note that the people writing these articles are probably not going to be technical or in-depth as we are not Blender Developers and will just serve as a way of letting people know about collections of important/interesting updates in a periodic fashion. It you spot something that is wrong or could be explained better please correct us :)

So with all the rambling above let's begin.

= Date: 28 Feb 2012 - Blender SVN Revision: 44505 - Type: Bug Fix =

With the recent landing of BMesh into Blender trunk. A number of small fixes and updates have been carried out on trunk to get certain features to work correctly. One of those features was making a filled face from a polygon that forms a triangle.

= Date: 28 Feb 2012 - Blender SVN Revision: 44520 - Type: Brought Back Feature =

Cycles until this commit did not have direct support for Mask Layers which work by taking objects on a specified Mask Layer and use those objects to block out the display of objects that are behind them

= Date: 28 Feb 2012 - Blender SVN Revision: 44521 - Type: Brought Back Feature =

For all you people that like to do panorama rendering, you now can do so using Cycles as Panorama option for the Camera has been brought into Cycles.

= Date: 28 Feb 2012 - Blender SVN Revision: 44523 - Type: Brought Back Feature =

Ambient Occlusion Passes are used to improve shading of models giving them a more realistic look. This commit allows an AO pass to be generated and passed to the Cycles node system. Meaning that users won't have to switch between Blender Internal Renderer just to get AO passes.

= Date: 28 Feb 2012 - Blender SVN Revision: 44532 - Type: New Feature =

Blender GUI got a view tweaks to make text easier to read in certain situation, also improves the search menu. Example of Before and after:

= Date: 29 Feb 2012 - Blender SVN Revision: 44540 - Type: Improvements =

If you are a user of 3D Control/NDOF devices, a few fixes and improvements were carried out to stopping crashing Blender when a device was plugged in after Blender was started. Hopefully makes Blender easier to use with those devices.

= Date: 01 Mar 2012 - Blender SVN Revision: 44580 - Type: Bug Fix =

Users of Multilayer OpenEXR with Blender were finding the exr files were not compressing correctly when being created, this should be fixed now.

= Date: 01 Mar 2012 - Blender SVN Revision: 44589 - Type: Bug Fix =

The Combine Hue Saturation Value Alpha node was not dealing correctly with fixed color input nodes.

= Date: 01 Mar 2012 - Blender SVN Revision: 44592 - Type: Bug Fix =

Some of Blender new Dynamic Paint feature were able to crash Blender because they did not have a texture assigned to a texture slow. This commit fixes this so Blender won't crash.

= Date: 03 Mar 2012 - Blender SVN Revision: 44615 - Type: New Feature =

In the Blender Game Engine you can now use the Armature Actuator to set the Bone Influence amount to change dynamically. Also you can now select Damped Track in the Blender Game Engine.

Patch developed as part of a project to NF-UBC Nereus Program. Development time 'sponsored' by the project www.nereusprogram.org

Here is a link to a blend test file demonstrating the new functionality for the Game Engine.

= Date: 03 Mar 2012 - Blender SVN Revision: 44616 - Type: New Feature =

With the landing of BMesh in trunk, edge rotation was a little bit temperamental, a few stability fixes have been added to Blender, but also a new feature. Now BMesh has the ability to rotate multiple edges at once.

= Date: 04 Mar 2012 - Blender SVN Revision: 44629 - Type: Brought Back Feature =

In Blender version 2.4 you could convert quad faces (faces with four edges) in to tri faces (3 sided triangular faces) using Shift+T (Quads to Tris) and Ctrl+Shift+T which would split the triangles in a different direction (the beauty option would be disabled). Until this commit the Ctrl+Shift+T version was not available in Blender 2.6x.

= Date: 04 Mar 2012 - Blender SVN Revision: 44629 - Type: New Addon =

Blender Oscurart Tools 2.9 addon, has been moved to the Addon Contrib folder in svn, meaning that if you compile Blender from trunk you will now have the Oscurart Tools available in your addons. Just enable the Testing section of your addons in User Preferences and Oscurart Tools will be available to enable. Very useful addon for speed up certain modeling/rigging things.

= Date: 04 Mar 2012 - Blender SVN Revision: 44633 - Type: New Feature =

For all you Blender Compositor users out there. Now when Ctrl+Shift+Left Mouse Button clicking in the compositor, if you don't have a Viewer Node in your Node network, the compositor will create one automatically and connect to it. Simple but this is going to be such a time saver.

= Date: 04 Mar 2012 - Blender SVN Revision: 44640 - Type: New Feature =

When the Movie Clip Editor has its curves displayed you will be able to use Border Select to select control point along the curves. Activated by pressing the B hotkey. Should make selecting large areas of curve quickly much more intuitive.

= Date: 04 Mar 2012 - Blender SVN Revision: 44643 - Type: New Feature =

There's new option available when using the Movie Clip Editor "Fit View" which will fit the current frame to the size of the Clip Editor Viewport. The hotkey is F.

= Date: 05 Mar 2012 - Blender SVN Revision: 44643 - Type: Bug Fix =

Up until this commit if you used blender's rotate selected edges feature you would lose certain properties that could be associated with those edges, such as creases, seams & bevel weight, etc. This fix protects those properties among other and means you can use edge rotation without having to worry.

= Date: 06 Mar 2012 - Blender SVN Revision: 44683 - Type: Bug Fix =

If you use Open Collada you may have noticed that since the BMesh merge the faces and uv maps of Collada models imported into Blender where missing. This commit fixes those issue so you should not be able to import Collada models more accurately.

That's all the interesting Blender SVN updates for this time, hope you found something useful.