Announcements
- Nathan Letwory started a proposal on how to handle LTS . Feedback is welcome.
- Added contributors (welcome all!):
- Robert Gützkow now has commit rights for the Blender repository.
- Marco Pavanello now has commit rights for the Add-ons repository to develop “Real Snow”.
- Michael Soluyanov now has commit rights for the Add-ons repository to maintain themes.
Google Summer of Code
- The students’ proposals are currently under review (until April 30).
- Mentors to start reviewing the proposals, and claim the proposals that they want to mentor.
Blender 2.83
- bcon3 is next week’s Wednesday on April 15th.
- Nathan Letwory will prepare a workboard to reflect what needs to be done still for the release.
- There are at the moment 25 known high priority bugs .
- Developers to fix high priority bugs in their area and find other bugs that have not being marked as high priority.
Blender 2.90
Final release schedule presented by Nathan Letwory:
- bcon1 April 15, 2020 (master)
- bcon2 June 10, 2020 (master)
- bcon3 July 8, 2020 (blender-v2.90-release)
- bcon4 August 5, 2020 (blender-v2.90-release)
- bcon5 August 12 20, 2020 (blender-v2.90-release)
Communication
As a follow up for last week intention of making communication more open there are a few new things:
- A new subforum in devtalk to register any meeting developers have. These notes should be treated as public documents - readable by someone not in the meeting. All developers are encouraged to use it.
- New changes in blender.chat to facilitate 1:1 discussions to happen publicly (see next).
- Daily Activity Reports posted on #blender-coders with the work from the BI/BF developers (contributors that want to be included, just poke Dalai Felinto before 17h CEST).
- There are still no decisions on the communication channels for the modules. Each module is still free to decide whether to use devtalk or blender.chat or bf-committers.
blender.chat
- Threads and discussions were re-introduced last week.
- There are mixed impressions on how much they help or get on the way.
New Features and Changes
Sculpt
- Sculpt Mode ( Pablo Dobarro )
- Share Automasking options between all brushes.
- Automasking option to use Face Set boundaries.
- Face Sets support for Multires.
- Option to delay updating mesh until viewport navigation ends, for smoother navigation.
- Voxel Remesh ( Pablo Dobarro )
- Add operator to interactively edit voxel size.
- Add Voxel mode to the Remesh modifier, matching the Remesh operator.
Other
- Sequencer: show f-curves for opacity and volume values on strips. ( Alessio Monti di Sopra )
- Fluids: more accurate subframe support ( Jacques Lucke )
- Cycles: optimize Noise textures with AVX for modern CPUs. ( Omar Ahmad )
- Mesh Edit: M key now opens the Merge menu, Alt+M opens the Split menu. ( Campbell Barton )
- Armature Edit: add Select Linked support with Ctrl+L ( Campbell Barton )
- Curve Edit: improve extrude to extrude segments rather than individual points. ( Germano Cavalcante)
4 Comments
Blender is gaining momentum, 2.90 is ahead. Be caferul not to hit Blender's with this speed. Too many major changes at a time ruined many projects, remember that.
That's what LTS is for.
the version number mess will become apparent soon.
2.8, 2.9, 3, 4, 8, 12...
Why fix what wasn't broken...
Blender's numbering system is moving up too quick. It should be 2.84 instead of 2.90. The tradition has always been big features but small number version. Don't use big or small features as a trigger happy to advance the version number like Autodesk.