Notes for weekly communication of ongoing projects and modules.

Welcomes

• Leon Schittek has been granted commit access. He has been working on UI and nodes improvements. Welcome!

Announcements

• A new sculpting demo file has been added for the cloth sculpting toolset

Modules & Projects

• 2022-3-29 Blender Rendering Meeting

New Features and Changes

Cycles

• Add support for light groups (commit) (Alex Fuller, Lukas Stockner)
• Approximate shadow caustics using manifold next event estimation (commit) (Olivier Maury)
• Enable Alembic procedural for final renders (commit) (Kévin Dietrich)

Asset Browser

• Enable collection assets (no longer experimental) (commit) (Julian Eisel)
• Instancing operator option for collection asset dropping (commit) (Julian Eisel)
• Support automatic collection previews (commit) (Julian Eisel)

Curves

• Add “Curve Pen” tool to curve edit mode (GSoC 2021 project) (commit) (Dilith Jayakody)
• New curves object type
  • Support converting curves to legacy hair system (commit) (Jacques Lucke)
  • Support set origin and apply transform operators (commit) (Hans Goudey)
  • Improve Snake Hook brush (commit) (Jacques Lucke)

Geometry Nodes

• Add search to named attribute input node (commit) (Hans Goudey)
• Don’t create node tree when adding nodes modifier (commit) (Leon Schittek)
• Performance improvements
  • Port resample node to the new data-block (commit) (Hans Goudey)
  • Port set handle nodes to new data-block (commit) (Hans Goudey)
  • Port parameter node to the new data-block (commit, commit) (Hans Goudey)
  • Port curves length nodes to the new data-block (commit, commit) (Hans Goudey)
• Remove soft min from extrude node scale (commit) (Hans Goudey)

Import/Export

• New C++ based OBJ importer, marked as experimental for now (commit) (Ankit Meel)
• Mark the new 3.1+ OBJ exporter as experimental, and reintroduce the menu entry for the old importer (commit, commit) (Aras Pranckevicius)

Library Overrides

• Add initial system overrides for internal overrides (commit, commit, commit, commit) (Bastien Montagne)
• Outliner
  • New “Hierarchies” view mode for Library Overrides (commit) (Julian Eisel)
  • Don’t show indirectly linked Library Overrides properties (commit) (Julian Eisel)
  • Adjustments to override icons (commit, commit) (Julian Eisel, Bastien Montagne)
  • Rename some override removal operators (commit) (Bastien Montagne)

Node Editor

• Cut hidden links when creating node groups (commit) (Leon Schittek)
• Improve node editor dot background (commit) (Leon Schittek)

User Interface

• Select the start to end range of syntax errors in the text editor (commit) (Campbell Barton)
• Keymap
  • Use click to de-select others for “Mouse Select & Move” (commit) (Campbell Barton)

Modifiers

• Support applying modifiers for multi-user data (commit) (Dalai Felinto)
• Add option for fading to the build modifier (commit, commit) (Yiming Wu, Antonio Vazquez)
• Add soft limit for Bevel segments in modifier (commit) (Pratik Borhade)

Miscellaneous

• Support multi-user data in “Apply Object Transform” operator (commit) (Dalai Felinto)

Weekly Reports

• Bastien Montagne
• Campbell Barton
• Germano Cavalcante
• Hans Goudey
• Jacques Lucke
• Jeroen Bakker
• Julian Eisel
• Kévin Dietrich
• Lukas Stockner
• Omar Emara
• Philipp Oeser
• Pratik Borhade
• Richard Antalik
• Sebastian Parborg
• Sergey Sharybin
• Sybren Stüvel
• Thomas Dinges
• Joe Eagar
• Yiming Wu