Gooseberry Branch hair shape keys?

It’s been a while since we heard anything about the Gooseberry branch for Blender. Has this been added to the master branch? I can’t find the shape keys feature for hair in the new master versions but the previous gooseberry branch released in 2015 has it.
Has any features from the branch been added to Blender 2.77a at all?

Some features yes and some no.
Since the particle system is unstable i believe, this is just my point of view, all gooseberry hair feature won’t make it to the actual master on its current status. That why (my pov again) Lukas is removing hair from master so that hair (particle) can be rewritten.
May be someone might jump in and add all those gooseberry hair feature, we are in FLOSS world, we are allowed to believe in miracle :slight_smile:

Gooseberry’s hair children and hair dynamics were added to blender 2.74.

Hair Shape Keys were seen as a production hack. Not enough elegant, clean or polished to go in official release.

Particles system will have a nodes-based interface and a different cache system.
Actually, Lukas is removing particles code and point cache in separated branches.
He is cleaning parts of Blender in several times in branches that allows him to keep a track of clean-up through commit logs.

When all rooms of the house will be empty; blender will be ready to welcome 2.8 code.

Okay. Will be keeping the old gooseberry branch then. I think softwares should be geared towards more control rather than simulation (which has it’s advantages of course) but with this, you can animate grass, particles and even hair exactly the way you want and be free from the technical/physics aspect of simulation.
It’s kinda like 2d animation that gives you full control of everything but in 3d. Having this option is a huge plus especially if you want precise results. I am hoping they continue to develop it. I know some people may find this technique time consuming but it’s worth the time and effort. Using the hair brush to move particles around and setting shape keys is a huge time saver. The next step would be being able to keyframe the hair particles directly in the timeline for more realism.

Special thanks to Lukas for developing this. Is there somewhere where one can get the latest release? Maybe somewhere he uploads a version with this feature for others to test? The last release I can find is last year.

Holding out hope for any of the Gooseberry hair features not currently in master is a fruitless effort. Particles and physics are on the roadmap to be completely torn out and built from scratch, and hair is to be refactored into its on bit of code separate from the particle system (finally). The Gooseberry code was pretty ugly and hacky seeing as it was implemented during production, and likely had little chance of getting into master anyway.

As far as “the latest release”, there are no new Gooseberry releases as they’re no longer developing it. As for his current work, it’s early days still mostly involving ripping out obsolete sections of the code base in a way that doesn’t break Blender as a whole. There’s nothing usable to see, and it’s unlikely that there will be for a while yet.

Does anyone know where one can download the gooseberry branch that was released for Blender that had shape keys for hair? I can’t find the windows version on graphicall. If I remember correctly, it was built by yosemite? Was it removed?

EDIT- I forgot I made a gooseberry related thread before (should have searched the forums before starting a new one…my apologies). I deleted the 2015 gooseberry branch some time back. I wanted to re-download it but it is no longer on graphicall ( Windows version).