Blender developers meeting notes – 2018-10-29

1) Blender 2.8

Beta and roadmap are explained here.

• EEVEE got much improved soft shadows.
• Multi-object editing now works for lattices.
• Rigify addon was ported to 2.8.
• Cycles gained Cryptomatte support.
• Grease Pencil:
  • Grease Pencil layers can be filtered by view layer for compositing.
  • Instance modifier was renamed to array modifier.
  • New time offset modifier:

Weekly Reports

• Bastien
• Brecht
• Campbell
• Dalai
• Jacques
• Philipp
• Sergey

2) Other Projects

• Mantaflow was submitted for code review. Likely too late for 2.80, but
  review should start as soon as possible so it can be ready for 2.81.
• Alexander Gavrilov has some unreviewed animation patches. Developers
  familiar with the area, please help reviewing.

3) Blender Conference

Blender 2.8 development presentations:

There was an informal Blender developers meeting. Some topics discussed:

• Going back to 3-4 months release schedule after 2.80 was generally
  considered a good idea. Longer releases are difficult to organize, and
  difficult for external contributors to participate in.
• How to handle bugfix releases. Idea was that if we have frequent releases
  again and keep master quite stable, we can do a/b/c releases with only a
  handful critical bugfixes. This should make it much faster to do such
  releases, compared to trying to include hundreds of fixes.
• Developer wiki migration is still problematic:
  • Addon docs are missing with no decision on keeping them in the wiki or
    moving them elsewhere. As a result addon links in the 2.79 release are
    broken, we should fix this.
  • Code architecture and 2.8 code docs are still on the old wiki, we need
    to migrate the relevant ones.
  • Developer onboarding docs could be improved, Inês looks into it.