Announcements

• Google Summer of Code students deadline is March 31st, don’t miss the deadline.
• blender.chat server will be updated Monday (march 30th) night.

Communication

• Dalai Felinto suggests “threaded discussions” to be brought back to blender.chat with the update. It helps 1:1 discussions to happen in the public open channels.
• Also he will try to post on #blender-coders more often the outcome of the talk with the other developers (e.g., a compilation of the daily report of activity by the developers).
• As a rule of thumb all the developers are heavily encouraged to use the open channels as much as possible (as oppose to private messages).

Other

• Germano Calvalcante insists a 2.82b release would be benefitial. He will post on bf-committers about that.

New Features and Changes

Sculpt

• New Surface Smooth brush and mesh filter, to smooth surfaces and remove detail without losing volume. ( Pablo Dobarro )
• Push Brush: option to set IK segments position and weights based on face sets. ( Pablo Dobarro )
• Brushes: weight normal and area sampling towards the brush center. ( Pablo Dobarro )
• Face Sets: create from mesh connectivity, material slots, face normals, UV seams, creases, sharp edges, bevel weights, face maps, and edit mode selection. ( Pablo Dobarro )

Render

• Eevee: alpha hash support for hair, for more accurate shadows and transparency. ( Joe Eagar )
• Overlays: more accurate wireframe rendering in the viewport. ( Clément Foucault )
• Cycles: fix OpenCL performance regressions from recent releases. ( Brecht Van Lommel, Jeroen Bakker )

Modifier

• Solidify:
  • Improve material handling in complex mode. ( Henrik Dick )
  • Option to assign shell & rim geometry to selected vertex groups. ( Cody Winchester )
• Surface Deform: add vertex group and strength control. ( Cody Winchester )
• Vertex Weight Edit: add invert curve falloff option. ( Cody Winchester )
• Warp: add bone from and bone to options when using armature objects. ( Cody Winchester )
• Subivision and Multires: enable optimal display by default. ( Sergey Sharybin )

User Interface

• New Blender > System menu, with operators for technical users and developers. ( Campbell Barton )
• Theme options for checkerboard pattern colors and size ( Michael Soluyanov )
• Support unicode character display independent of translation. ( Brecht Van Lommel )
• Experimental option to include menu items in operator search. ( Campbell Barton )
• Add View Layer now has options New, Copy and Blank (all collections disabled). ( Chris Clyne )

Weekly Reports

• Bastien Montagne
• Brecht Van Lommel
• Campbell Barton
• Clément Foucault
• Dalai Felinto
• Germano Cavalcante
• Jacques Lucke
• Jeroen Bakker
• Julian Eisel
• Nathan Letwory
• Pablo Dobarro
• Philipp Oeser
• Richard Antalik
• Sebastián Barschkis
• Sebastian Parborg
• Sergey Sharybin
• Sybren Stüvel
• …