13 December 2021

Notes for weekly communication of ongoing projects and modules.

Welcomes

• Animation & Rigging module has two new members: Brad Clark and Orestis Konstantinidis (@Orestiskon).

Announcements

• Cycles now has a Metal GPU backend, contributed by Apple. Metal GPU rendering is currently supported on Apple M1 computers running macOS 12.0 (Monterey).

Modules & Projects

Geometry Nodes

• 2021-12-6 - 2021-12-10 Geometry Nodes Sub-Module Meetings

Animation & Rigging

• 2021-12-09 Animation & Rigging Module Meeting

New Features and Changes

Geometry Nodes

• New nodes for basic access of mesh topology (Johnny Matthews)
  • Vertex Neighbors (commit)
  • Face Neighbors (commit)
  • Edge Vertices (commit)
  • Edge Neighbors (commit)
  • Face Area (commit)
• Geometry to Instance node to create instances from geometry directly (commit) (Jacques Lucke)
• Scene Time Node to replace #frame driver (commit) (Johnny Matthews)
• Mesh Island Node (commit) (Johnny Matthews)
• Performance improvements
  • Improve memory reuse in procedure executor (commit) (Jacques Lucke)
  • Resolve performance issue with highly nested fields (commit) (Jacques Lucke)
  • Remove unnecessary copy when replacing geometry data (commit) (Hans Goudey)

Render/Cycles

• Sky Texture: Use Gauss-Laguerre quadrature for optical depth calculation (commit) (Lukas Stockner)
• Support merging images rendered with adaptive sampling (commit) (Andrii)
• Add Fisheye Lens Polynomial camera model (commit) (Håkan Ardö)
• Add hysteresis to resolution divider algorithm (commit) (Alaska)

Weekly Reports

• Campbell Barton
• Germano Cavalcante
• Hans Goudey
• Jacques Lucke
• Jeroen Bakker
• Julian Eisel
• Philipp Oeser
• Pratik Borhade
• Richard Antalik
• Sybren Stüvel
• Thomas Dinges
• William Leeson