Development
Developers have been testing the #blender-coders channel on blender.chat as an alternative to IRC, to make discussion more visible and lower the barrier to entry. A decision on moving there officially will be made soon.
There is a blog post on new module teams organization.
Clang-format is now used for formatting the Blender source code. All committers must use it for consistent style. For more information and how to update branches, see the wiki page.
There are three new design docs with ideas and plans for everything nodes: Mesh Type Requirements, Categorizing Modifiers, Simulation Architecture Proposal. (Jacques Lucke)
New Features and Changes
User Interface
- The top bar with tool settings is now part of the 3D viewport and image editor headers instead of being global. Further changes are planned, this is not the final design yet. (Campbell Barton, Brecht Van Lommel)
- The Adjust Last Operation panel can now be optionally hidden in the 3D viewport and other headers, from the view menu. In this case the menu can be accessed from the global Edit menu, or the F9 shortcut key. (Campbell Barton)
- Industry Compatible Keymap: many updates based on user feedback. (William Reynish)
- Outliner: show children of objects inside collections again. Child objects that are members of a different collection are drawn with a stippled line and greyed out. (commit) (Dalai Felinto)
3D Viewport
- Display of edit mode vertices, edges and faces has been improved. (Clément Foucault)
- Solid draw mode now supports displaying Vertex colors, next to Single, Object, Material and Random. (Jeroen Bakker)
- Mesh Analysis display options in the viewport are now available again. (Jeroen Bakker)
- The grid in side views and the grid floor in perspective views can now be enabled or disabled separately. (Jeroen Bakker)
Video Sequencer
The cache system was rewritten. There is now more user control, with settings about what to cache in the Proxy & Cache panel in the sidebar. Cached frames are now displayed in the sequencer timeline. (commit) (Richard Antalík)
More
- Spline IK: support changing individual bone length via Y scaling. (commit) (Alexander Gavrilov)
- Bendy Bones: split the Scale In/Out properties into X and Y values. (Alexander Gavrilov)
- Grease Pencil:
- New dots gradient. (commit) (Antonio Vazquez)
- New normalize weights and normalize all operators for vertex groups. (Antonio Vazquez)
- Text editor: convert tabs to spaces on paste, if the Tabs to Spaces setting is enabled. (Bruno Boaventura Scholl)
- Images: packing of painted and baked images now works for float and multilayer images. (Brecht Van Lommel)
1 Comment
I'm OK with separating simulations out of the modifier stack as long as it doesn't result in a loss of functionality.
But given what that would imply, I don't see how removing them from the modify stack could be possible without a loss of functionality.
Right now there are a few things which are possible with the current system that wouldn't be possible if simulations were removed from the modify stack. It's a weird setup admittedly but functionality is what matters of course.
For example, I can create a cube, add a subsurf modifier to smooth it into a ball, then add an array modifier, THEN add cloth simulation to it, and Blender will simulate the result of the subsurf+array modifier, simulating individual balls of cloth.
Then because it's all based on a modify stack, I have non-destructive editing, I can select the original cube, extrude an edge, and make it into a sausage, and the subsurf/array/cloth results will update.
Then I could change the order of the modifiers, put the cloth simulation before the array, and just simulate one subsurfed mutated cube with an array duplication of the result of the cloth simulation. Then add solidify or do a boolean or whatever else, before or after the simulation.
Having the simulation right in the modifier stack CAN be really useful, and to be fair, the term modifier can be thought of as meaning 'That which modifies things', and simulations certainly do modify objects.
Not sure, I would advise 'proceed with caution' and consider as many use cases as possible before changing the current setup. A better simulation system would be great, but care will have to be taken to avoid breaking any existing workflows, and we wouldn't want any regressions in the flexibility of the system.