2017-12-02: 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.

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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

  • 5% speed improvement for subsurf modifier rB1d33843e
  • Haiku OS Support rB28d2148b
  • Cycles: Improve denoising speed on GPUs with small tile sizes rBfa3d50af
  • Select similar for bones by group index rB099a99db
  • Cycles: add object level holdout property rBe4b54f44
  • Cycles: 1-2% speed improvement rB7e349f27
  • PyAPI: add function to check any mathutils type rBc17c6557
  • PyAPI: Allow structs to define tags for their properties rBad625acd
  • Speed up stabilization tracking by 50% rBbf5b931d
  • Sequencer: Add option to render OpenGL preview with DoF rB9b42b3e1
  • Speedup mask drawing by 5-10% rB440aa2bf
  • Speedup mask rendering by 25% rB06e64058
  • Speedup movie tracking by tracking 10-15% rB440a49a2
  • Speed up subdividing by 20% rB2b6f3455
  • Improve edge rotate when edges share faces rB329bf8e1

cycles_texture_cache

This branch adds a texture cache feature for rendering a large number of largely sized textures in a pre-defined modest memory footprint.

See This email for more information.

cycles_embree

This adds the Embree raytracing kernels developed by Intel into Cycles.

See This email for more information.

fluid-mantaflow

  • Split viscosity settings into base and exponent rBbc6ab0f0
  • Add settings for fluid diffusion (i.e. viscosity and surface tension) rB02b27194

blender2.8

  • Groups and collection: create group from collection rBaeaf87bb
  • Groups and collection: initial integration rBbe9e469e
  • ID static override: add basic support for overriding animation rB75eb219a
  • ID static override: make basic object & bones transformations overridable rB20ae4f92
  • ID static override: make most Image properties overridable rBbde39e51
  • ID Static Override: add basic generic UI tools to control override of properties rB00078736
  • ID Static Override: add basic UI feedback rBe36b5f00
  • Merge ID static override, part I: core changes in DNA, BKE and .blend read/write rB39b8a330

greasepencil-object

New Patches

  • Cycles: Re-enabled motion blur for object scaling D2937

Other Projects

Documentation

Have a look at the 2.8 WIP release notes: https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.80