No mention of the SDF plans Francesco mentioned at the BCON 24. 
But at least Hair Dynamics is listed, so that’s a very good thing, I hope.
With luck Overrides will be a good step forward as well.
Eh, I’ll believe it when I see it. Last few years have had lots of big goals and not a lot of actual finished projects. Eevee Next still doesn’t have the promised feature parity with Eevee, for instance
I only the production tool section makes it I’ll be happy.
Some of the projects over the last year have actually been stuff that has long been promised by the devs, but wound up starting a couple years later than what the announcement suggested.
Blender is such a big application now that simply addressing technical debt, longtime usability issues and bugs, and polishing the tools that are there would be enough to consume most of the available development time for 2025. It is getting to the point where we are less in need of shiny new things, because we have most of the features that the big commercial apps. have (at least on paper) but many of them lack polish or are more difficult to use for production than they should be.
I was hoping to see Eevee next in the projects for 2025. Oh well. I hope they are still going to work on it more as it did not seem to move too much further since it’s debut. After the feedback at the blender site got closed down, I don’t really see too many updates on it anymore.
I don’t think that’s very fair…
These were the projects that were planned for 2024, and of a total six, five have been fully implemented (or at least have a minimum viable product), and the “future of animation” is being worked on currently.
The extensions platform, GPU compositor, Grease Pencil 3 and Brush assets were all completed in full (as far as the initial plans were concerned).
Whether you think they’ve been implemented to high enough standards is neither here nor there, as it stands, the BF was remarkably good at sticking to their plans last year.
That’s a good perspective, thanks for sharing 
At least
PERFORMANCE: EEVEE material shader compilation
Is on thelist. I am sure that shadows will get better, Cycles and Eevee are ongoing and always get improvements.
I also like
Better integration across node trees will allow node groups to be shared between different types of node systems, like shading and the compositor.
Sculpting layers and quite a few other things too.
Eevee Next - released as viable? Hardly. Certainly not as viable as Eevee was, when they removed it.
Yeah, Eevee Next might be released but it’s the furthest thing from viable. I can’t fairly count it as a completed project. GP3 also isn’t complete, and still has many missing features, open bugs, or lack of parity with GP2.
The GPU compositor, however, is a remarkable 2024 achievement
thorn an joseph I am sure that you know there is an ongoing project for a new NPR engine.
I think this thread was more for things to look forward to, than yet another Eeevee woes discussion.
And all this shows is that there is still a very real reason why professionals would rather not use FOSS if they can afford Maya and the other commercial solutions. You will never see Autodesk. Maxon, and others deciding that features in such a poor state (as in, borderline unusable and not just having bugs) would be seen as worthy to ship and worthy to highlight (at least if they do not want to see layoffs and a CEO change).
This is why I continue to believe that Blender being in a competitive position now is not because of what the BF did under its own power, but rather because of the unpopular EULA and licensing changes of the big boys that made dealing with Blender’s lack of polish and the BF’s sketchy decision making less painful in comparison (which in turn allowed the development fund to see dramatic growth).
Good point, let’s keep it positive. I’m excited to see what happens with story tools 
I think Blender has a solid chance to make big strides in the storyboarding industry, many industry boarders I follow on social media are starting to use Blender in their workflow
Eevee legacy was depreciated because the devs do not have the workforce to continue developing 2 systems. The time spent updating legacy is now spent on Eevee next.
I know some people are unhappy but they can still viably use 4.2 until they deem Eevee next ready. Which will be faster as they do not have to worry about breaking things in legacy anymore.
It’s absolutely fair and the Blender guys are now aware of this themselves. They refer even to the decades-old meme about them > “We can now shift focus to start (and finish!) brand-new projects.”
However, the introduction of the term MVP does not indicate a fundamental change because it simply means unfinished features.
So at least everything stays the same with the difference that the guys can now laugh about this meme instead of reacting to it in an uncool way.
excited for this one as well -
“Shape Keys are another area requiring attention, particularly for character pipelines that rely on multiple shape keys for finer details and adjustment layers. The current storage system significantly impacts scalability. The plan is to modernize their storage, transitioning it to a more generic attribute system—similar to the approach used for UVs—and implement sparse storage, ensuring that only the parts of a shape key that differ are stored.”
Definitely a big plus for larger productions using cuda blendshape rigs and sumsuch
Sorry, I’m going to push back on that.
I’m a professional, and can afford to use any 3D software I want. I don’t like perpetual cloud licensing, but that’s a separate issue.
I use Blender, because I want to use Blender. Full stop.
As to this:
…you absolutely, 100% will. No layoffs happened, no CEO was dumped. (And notably, cloud software has made it even more common.)
Yes, I’m annoyed with Eevee Next. I’ll leave that for another thread. But at the very least, it’s nice that some issues are already on the project board as noted for improvement.
But it’s just not fair nor accurate to say that commercial companies don’t knowingly release unfinished features.
what exactly is wrong with Eevee Next except performance? for me it seems to work great so far.