Blender developers meeting notes: June 17, 2019

Put this on your calendar: the tentative release date of the first Release Candidate (RC) of Blender 2.80 is July 11!

Development

• We will aim for a 2.80 release candidate around July 11, 3 weeks from now. After the release candidate only important bug fixes would go in, with every commit carefully checked. This will also give us the opportunity to test making the release build with all platform maintainers.
• Much of the Blender manual was updated last week, but still about another week of work remains. For anyone interested in helping out, there are still a few chapters without anyone assigned, and many of chapters where screenshots need to be updated. (organization task)

New Features and Changes

No new features now that we are getting close to the release. About 90 bugs were fixed last week.

Weekly Reports

• Bastien
• Brecht
• Campbell
• Clément
• Dalai
• Jacques
• Jeroen
• Philipp
• Sebastian
• Sergey

Summer of Code Reports

Here's an overview of Summer of Code progress so far. Some of the projects have features available for testing (builds available here):
* Outliner: improved selection and navigation tools, start of 3D viewport synced selection, and many other improvements. (Nathan Craddock)
* Procedural texture nodes: improved math, vector math and mapping nodes. New map range, clamp and white noise nodes. (Omar Ahmad)
* Custom bevel profile: initial implementation of custom profile in bevel modifier. (Hans Goudey)
* LANPR: integration with grease pencil, and many other fixes and tweaks. (Yiming Wu)
* Fast Import/Export: STL export is working, OBJ is in progress. (Hugo Sales)

For other projects work is happening under the hood still:
* Cloth simulation: adaptive mesh subdivision implementation is in place, to be integrated with the simulation. (Ish Bosamiya)
* Embree: initial implementation of conversion from Embree to Cycles BVH, performance benefits will come once this is more complete. (Quentin Matillat)
* VR: lots of low-level work to integrate OpenXR into Blender's windowing system. (Julian Eisel)