2017-11-11: Weekly News

Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Blender Development! Blender is the free and opensource 3D creation suite for the next generation of artist. Follow the development on Twitter @BlenderDev.

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Tip

Remember, you can test any changes done in master or blender2.8 by going to the developmental builds download page

Changes to Blender

master

  • Small (7%) performance increase in metaball tessellation rBd95eabf0
  • Cycles: better distance sampling for chromatic volume extinction (see link for comparison images) rBa466d7ae
  • Cycles: add bevel shader, for raytrace based rounded edges (see the link in the commit message for example images) rB26f39e63
  • Cycles: antialias normal baking if the mesh has a bump map rBd0af56fe
  • Cycles: reduce closure memory usage for emission/shadow shader data (30% memory improvement) rB8a72be76
  • Cycles: fix inefficient attribute map storage, saves 615MB in victor scene. rBcac3d4d1

blender2.8

  • Manipulators: add a new ruler tool rB0260fad9
  • Small speedup for viewport data caching (60% improvement) rBed555750
  • Support Auto-Smooth in Edit-Mode rB5d70e847
  • UI: show tool-tips for each tools shortcuts rBfbfda21f

greasepencil-object

Along with the noted changes below, there was a lot of work done to have the changes reading to be merged into the blender2.8 branch.

  • Add smoothing to the stroke thickness rBfce610ee
  • Add drawing parameter to adjust stroke stabilization rBa051c2e8
  • Add more parameters to define how the stroke is stabilized rB526e2291

New Patches

  • Optionally cancel render when a texture is missing D2908
  • Experimental hashing lookup of ID’s, replacing linked list lookups D2910
  • Cycles: Reducing amount of operations per intersect check (8% speed improvement) D2911
  • Array Modifier: option to offset UV’s D2912
  • blender2.8: support for metaball drawing D2914

Other Projects

  • None

Documentation

  • None