Blender Developers meeting notes, February 5

There's a lot of good stuff in this week's notes: Blender 2.78b is expected this Tuesday, 2.79 targets are becoming clear, the Google Summer of Code application has been submitted and a new developer joins the Blender Institute in Amsterdam!

Ton writes:

1) Blender 2.78b, performance update

• Linux and Windows binaries are ready
• Mac OS version is coming soon. Sergey Sharybin will provide a release text and benchmark info. Ton Roosendaal will do updates on blender.org and logs.
• Expected release date: this Tuesday.

2) Blender 2.79 targets

• Project page has been updated, with planning proposal.
• End of this month we want to make the final selection of targets.
  End of March these then should be finished in master.
• Shadow Catcher will go to master Tuesday latest. Thomas Beck will assist Sergey with demos/docs.
• Lukas Stockner's denoiser now is on the target list too. Lukas will remove the unfinished bits first.
• Mai Lavelle's split kernel (OpenCL) en auto-tile-size project will be ready for merging in 2.79 too.
• Luca Rood reminds everyone to test his deform modifier.

3) Blender 2.8

• We had a 90 minutes well visited project meeting in irc last week. Dalai Felinto will post the log and notes of that meeting here.
• In general we will move as much development in one 2.8 branch now.

4) Google Summer of Code

• Forms have been submitted, the Ideas page will get a last treatment this week. Deadline is 9 February. Google will announce the accepted orgs on 27 February.
• We can always use more mentors! Make sure you're known as mentor candidate by speaking up here.

5) Other news

Luca Rood will pack his bags in Brazil and will move to the Netherlands! He gets a job at Blender Institute per April. He will work with Dalai (viewport) and Sergey (depsgraph), work on
getting particles/hair restored in 2.8 and will do his share in dev support and fixes in the tracker.

Laters,

-Ton-