Dalai writes:
Announcements
- Blender 2.82a was released.
- This week starts the GSoC students applications period (until March 31st). If any developer wants to join the mentor team, poke Dalai Felinto. Even if only to help review and decide in the proposals.
- Asset Manager was one of the more troublesome topic during the quick ui workshop last month, so it got its own blog post to clarify the proposed design .
Blender 2.83
- bcon2 this Wednesday (18/03) to be managed by Nathan Letwory.
- The main pending features arew on track to be merged. Namely volume objects, virtual reality and faster Undo.
- Soon after branching happens, Dalai Felinto plans to merge D6811 . This will be followed by a
make formatcommit that will lead to merging conflicts for other patches.New Features and Changes
Grease Pencil
2D animation tools were revamped. (blog post ) ( Antonio Vázquez, Clément Foucault, Daniel Martinez Lara, Matias Mendiola, Pablo Vázquez )
- Always smooth stroke drawing and rendering
- Improved anti-aliasing, combining of 3D objects and strokes, color mixing and blending modes
- Significantly improved playback performance
- Lighting and color management integration
- New mask system
- Vertex paint mode
- Improved effects
Sculpt
- Multires implementation was revamped to fix artifacts with subdivide, reshape and apply base. (commit ) ( Sergey Sharybin )
- Edge automasking to keep open edge boundaries intact. ( Pablo Dobarro )
- More even color distribution for face sets. ( Pablo Dobarro )
- Face set boundary relax in Mesh Filter and Draw Face Sets tools. ( Pablo Dobarro )
Modifiers
- Ocean: new spectra to simulate turbulent oceans, established oceans and shallow water. ( Phil Stopford )
- Corrective Smooth: new scale modifier to handle scale in rigs. ( Lucas Veber )
- Surface Deform: improved playback performance. ( Jeroen Bakker )
Render
- Eevee: improved reflection probes to avoid artifacts as poles. Light caches need to be re-baked. ( Clément Foucault )
- Workbench: refactored workbench implementation that reduces memory usage. ( Clément Foucault )
- Workbench: improved volume shaders that correctly render density and dark colors. ( Brecht Van Lommel )
- Cycles: add view layer setting to exclude volumes. ( Brecht Van Lommel )
User Interface
- 7 themes contributed by the community are now bundled with Blender: White, Deep Grey, Dark Minimal, Print Friendly, XSI, Modo, Maya (task ) ( William Reynish, Pierre Schiller, Edward Agwi, Vojtěch Lacina, Michail Soluyanov, Jason van Gumster, Mr Wax Police, Jonathan Lampel )
- Various tweaks and polishing. ( Yevgeny Makarov, Adrian Newton, Eitan, Greg Neumiller, Hans Goudey, Harley Acheson, Alessio Monti di Sopra )
Python API
- New
foreach_set/foreach_getfunctions to access image pixel data much more efficiently than before. (details ) (Bogdan Nagirniak)Weekly Reports
