Notes for weekly communication of ongoing projects and modules.

Welcomes

• Yiming Wu will start a new dev grant to work on Lineart/Grease Pencil improvements.
• Lukas Stockner starts a new dev-grant to help the Cycles project.

Announcements

• Blender 3.1 has been released on March 9, 2022.

Modules & Projects

• Hair project status and initial planning.

New Features and Changes

Curves

• Sculpt mode
  • Add initial comb, grow and shrink brush (commit) (Jacques Lucke)
  • Actually delete curves with Delete brush (commit) (Jacques Lucke)
  • Disable stroke spacing for curve sculpt brushes (commit) (Jacques Lucke)
  • Rename initial brushes (commit) (Jacques Lucke)
• NURBS
  • Improve NURBS knot generation modes (commit, commit) (Laurynas Duburas)
  • Slightly speed up NURBS evaluation and reduce memory usage (commit, commit) (Hans Goudey)
• Increase default viewport resolution for curves object (commit) (Jacques Lucke)

User Interface

• Individualize the option to use transform snapping per editor type (commit) (Germano Cavalcante)
• Improve aligmnent in number fields and value sliders (commit) (Leon Schittek)

Cycles/Rendering

• Cycles
  • Show viewport hair settings when using Cycles (commit) (Ethan Hall)
  • Make smart interpolation fallback to cubic for GPU (commit) (Ethan Hall)
• Shader nodes
  • Add Alpha output to Object Info node (commit) (Ethan Hall)
  • Add alpha mode selector to Image Texture node (commit) (Ethan Hall)

Event System

• Key-press while dragging now activates drag first (commit, commit) (Campbell Barton)
• Drag events no longer default to the drag start location (commit) (Campbell Barton)
• 3D Mouse
  • Support changing NDOF button shortcuts (commit) (Campbell Barton)
  • Click/click-drag support for NDOF buttons (commit) (Campbell Barton)
  • Remove unused NDOF buttons (commit) (Campbell Barton)

Geometry Nodes

• Performance improvements
  • Port realize instances node to the new curves data-block (commit) (Hans Goudey)
  • Port mesh to curve node to new curves data-block (commit) (Hans Goudey)
  • Tiny optimization to UV Sphere primitive (commit) (Hallam Roberts)
• Implement CustomData interpolation for boolean data type (commit) (Aleksi Juvani)

Grease Pencil

• New “Additive” mode for build modifier (commit) (Marc Chéhab)
• Performance improvements
  • Improve multi-user gpencil data performance with modifiers (commit) (Yann Lanthony, Falk David)

Library Overrides

• Disable problematic/invalid operations in the outliner (commit) (Bastien Montagne)

Python API

• Add new annotation_pre & annotation_post handlers (commit) (Antonio Vazquez)
• Performance improvements
  • Optimize dependency graph use in python drivers (commit) (Campbell Barton)
  • Improve performance of Text.from_string/to_string (commit) (Campbell Barton)

Weekly Reports

• Campbell Barton
• Germano Cavalcante
• Hans Goudey
• Jacques Lucke
• Jeroen Bakker
• Omar Emara
• Philipp Oeser
• Pratik Borhade
• Richard Antalik
• Sebastian Parborg
• Sergey Sharybin
• Thomas Dinges
• Yiming Wu
• Jon Denning