Blender Developers Meeting Notes: May 15, 2023

Bart · May 17, 2023

Welcomes

Brad Clark gets a dev grant and works in the Animation & Rigging module as product manager for project Character Animation 2025.

Announcements

Modules & Projects

New Features and Changes

User Interface

Support operator enums in Quick Favorites (commit 20) (Philipp Oeser)
Add parent transform orientation icon (commit 18) (Kevin C. Burke)
Various UI text and layout improvements (commit 10, commit 8, commit 5) (Damien Picard, Daniel Salazar, Harley Acheson)

Geometry Nodes

Simulation
- Add “Calculate to Frame” operator (commit 13) (Lukas Tönne)
- Implement subframe mixing (commit 11) (Hans Goudey)
- Make caching optional (commit 6) (Hans Goudey)
- Allow skipping frames during playback (commit 7) (Jacques Lucke)
- Timeline editor
  - Show simulated frames only when there is a simulation (commit 3) (Jacques Lucke)
  - Add display toggle for cache in timeline (commit 3) (Hans Goudey)
  - Add theme option for simulated frames (commit 3) (Jacques Lucke)
Change “Separate Components” node output order to match Spreadsheet (commit 7) (Aliaksandr Sharstniou)
Add “Signed Distance” experimental input node (commit 18) (Erik Abrahamsson)
Performance
- Slightly optimize mesh to curve node (commit 6) (Hans Goudey)
- Skip topology map in extrude node with no edge attributes (commit 3) (Hans Goudey)

Cycles

oneAPI: enable hardware raytracing for Raytrace/MNEE kernels (commit 14, commit 5) (Xavier Hallade)

UV Editing

Add progress par and cancel ability to UV packing (commit 11) (Chris Blackbourn)

Viewport Compositor

Implement Denoise node (commit 13) (Omar Emara)
Implemenet Plane Track Deform node (commit 4) (Omar Emara)

Mesh

Improve custom normal calculation performance, reduce memory usage (commit 10) (Hans Goudey)
Tag no loose verts and edges when converting from BMesh (commit 5) (Hans Goudey)

Weekly Reports

Author Bart

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Community Lead at n8n.