2017-11-18: 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.

This Week in Blender Development is openly developed on Github so please report any recommendations, bugs, or PRs for this website there.

If you have idea for some great feature that you think should be part of Blender try making a post on https://blender.community/c/rightclickselect/

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

• Add select similar custom bone shape rBcd1d9950
• Mikktspace/Cycles: Speed up the merging of identical vertices (speeds up rendering) rB119846a6
• Cycles: Add per-tile render time debug pass rB40f528a7
• Cycles: Add Volume Direct and Volume Indirect passes for volume-scattered light rBa0c02e4d
• Fix UV Projection Center Calculation rB759b50b2
• Remove default ‘Clear loc/rot/scale delta transform’ shortcuts rB556b13f0
• Fix AMD Thread-Ripper rendering performance issues. rB55696b56
• Cycles: Make per-object random value output also work for Lamps rB212a8d9e
• BMesh Py API: Expose color alpha rBaae8e211

blender2.8

• Eevee: SSS: Add cubic profile for the sake of completeness. rB936ddde3
• Eevee: SSS: Add SSS to the principled shader rBfcbb8e71
• Eevee: SSS: Add Christensen-Burley diffusion profile rB57c3fbd3
• Draw Manager: Support for Metaball Drawing rB88c88c46
• Eevee: Add SSS objects to probe rendering rBe70c563a
• Eevee: SSS: Add Quality settings rB289f9f42
• Eevee: Initial Separable Subsurface Scattering implementation rBf8b14305

greasepencil-object

• Enable antialiasing while drawing rBe6a0b442
• Smooth Strength and Thickness properties too rB0b7c2ef2
• Improve subdivide stroke while drawing rBaaed5779
• Check minimum tablet pressure rB5819ab66
• Cleanup UI and unused fields rB330febba
• New Smooth modifier rB8b97a539
• Remove smooth lower limit rB541d7415
• Smooth Thickness and Strength rB333e32e0

fluid-mantaflow

• Re-enabled bubble rise factor and some small snd particles fixes rB91ef5780

hair_guides

• Operator for generating hair follicles of the fur modifier rBc8ef6904

New Patches

• Cycles: Speed up split kernel builds by splitting svm_eval_nodes out of direct_emission functions D2916
• Notifier system (event publish/subscribe) D2917
• Temporary fix for T53257: Too many color management transforms to display in the menu D2918
• SceneRenderLayer Removal/Refactor D2919
• Add initial UDIM support to BlenKernel, Image Editor and Cycles D2921

Other Projects

• None

Documentation

• None