Notes for weekly communication of ongoing projects and modules.

Modules & Projects

Rendering:

• 2021-08-03 Blender Rendering Meeting

Geometry Nodes:

• Jacques Lucke will be in Amsterdam this week for another geometry-nodes workshop.
• The main goal is to move on with the attributes proposals.
• Current prototypes:
  • temp-geometry-nodes-expandable-geometry-socket-prototype
  • temp-geometry-nodes-fields-prototype
  • builds available in buildbot.

New Features and Changes

USD

• Add USD importer (commit) (Michael Kowalski)

Asset Browser

• Use the active material slot when dropping a material on an object (commit) (Jeroen Bakker)
  • Add tooltip for material drag and drop (commit) (Jeroen Bakker)
• User interface improvements
  • Proper context menu for assets (commit) (Julian Eisel)
  • Header adjustments to be specific to the asset browser (rather than the file browser) (commit, commit) (Julian Eisel)

Grease Pencil

• Brush option to define Caps type (commit, commit) (Antonio Vazquez, Matias Mendiola)
• Select Random operator (commit) (Antonio Vazquez)
• Add Merge Layer to the default keymap: Shift+Ctrl+M (commit) (Antonio Vazquez)

Geometry Nodes

• Select by Handle Type Node (commit) (Hans Goudey)
• Curve Set Spline Type (commit) (Johnny Matthews)
• Add more warnings for out of bounds parameters (commit) (Eitan)

Rigging

• Action Constraint: Add Split Channels Mix choices from Copy Transforms (commit) (Alexander Gavrilov)

Cycles

• More flexible GI Approximation AO distance control (commit) (Sergey Sharybin)
• Make object Fast GI Approximation panel a subpanel of Shading (commit) (Brecht Van Lommel)
• Move Cycles visibility, holdout and shadow catcher properties to Blender (commit) (Brecht Van Lommel)

User Inferface

• Improve the font display name for text objects (commit) (Harley Acheson)
• Add the option to draw viewport normals with a constant length (commit) (Piotr Makal)
• Add light count to viewport statistics (commit) (Falk David)
• Make loop-cut tool drawing consistent between the active tool gizmo and the operator (commit) (Anthony Edlin)

Mesh Editing

• Support N-gons in the laplacian smooth edit mode operation (commit) (Campbell Barton)
• Improve performance by Tag normals dirty instead of calculating (commit) (Hans Goudey)

VR Support

• Action map support for XR controller input (commit) (Peter Kim)

Video Sequence Editor

• Allow Wingdings and Symbol Fonts (commit) (Harley Acheson)

Python API

• Library Overrides
  • Add removal of properties and operations to RNA API (commit) (Bastien Montagne)
  • Add RNA API to reset / delete overrides (commit) (Bastien Montagne)
  • Add python API function to update override operations (commit) (Jeroen Bakker)
• Expose Color Management as argument for gpu.types.GPUOffScreen.draw_view3d() (commit) (Gottfried Hofmann)

Weekly Reports

• Bastien Montagne
• Campbell Barton
• Germano Cavalcante
• Hans Goudey
• Jacques Lucke
• Jeroen Bakker
• Julian Eisel
• Manuel Castilla
• Pablo Dobarro
• Peter Kim
• Philipp Oeser
• Pratik Borhade
• Richard Antalik
• Sebastian Parborg
• Sebastián Barschkis
• Sergey Sharybin
• Sybren Stüvel