2 Likes
not to me, sculpting tools of blender are very good, not extensive as ZBrush but not the mess that polygon editing is on ZBrush. I do use them quite frequently actually cause I love sculpting.
Jeroen just started, and his inital work… WOW
Revamped support multithreaded compilation of kernels D2264 (Original patch by Lukas Stockner). BMW compilation time reduced from 55 seconds to:
- 40 seconds (
cycles.debug_opencl_kernel_single_program = True)- 20 seconds (
cycles.debug_opencl_kernel_single_program = False)
8 Likes
New Features and Changes
The focus continues to be on bug fixing and refining Blender 2.80. About 80 bugs were fixed last week.
- Cycles OpenCL compilation times have been reduced, using multithreaded compilation. ( Jeroen Bakker, Lukas Stockner ).
- Cycles animation denoising is now available as a Python operator, taking one or more rendered frames as input and producing a denoised frame. There is no user interface for this yet, that comes later. ( Lukas Stockner, Tangent Animation, Brecht Van Lommel ).
- Eevee now supports rendering of image sequence and movies. ( Brecht Van Lommel )
- Eevee lights not have units in Watt. ( Brecht Van Lommel )
- Wireframe drawing has had some further improvements in terms of quality, and now also supports wide lines on macOS. ( Clément Foucault )
- User interface layout tweaks for various panels. ( William Reynish )
- Keymap: new preference for shortcuts to work both with tap and pie menu. For example Z can be used to both toggle wireframe mode and open the shading mode pie menu. ( Campbell Barton )
- Keymap: Alt+N now flips normals in edit mode. ( Campbell Barton )
- Simplify settings now have an option to globally disable high resolution smoke volume drawing. ( Sergey Sharybin )
Development
- More outliner visibility changes were discussed among developers and designers. (design proposal )
Weekly Reports
9 Likes
Since keys are case sensitive, I’m never sure why Devs don’t write Alt+Shift+n instead of Alt+N seeing as one needs the second command key to capitalize to N, or is that not the case here and this is case-insensitive.
Capital N as in the name of the key you have to press, not the letter you get in some random text editor.
1 Like
i don’t understand what was wrong with shift + N
Shift+n is now recalculate normals so the shortcut is already taken.
1 Like
Agree on this.
2.8 shows a bit more promise in this regard, but I think the solution is to have a much clearer road map within a specific feature set, with clear goals on what it should do and match up against (as in the case of zbrush sculpting as the standard or ideal), then keep that roadmap published and on full display until it reaches the goal.
Its a lot like your refrigerator, you can pack it full of food, but if some items are tucked away in the back or in a compartment, you start to forget they exist and then keep buying new stuff to shove in there. The “out of sight, out of mind” also applies to development imo.
oh i didn’t focus here, i though they changed shift + n to alt + n, had a long day …
Really amazing to see 10 developers report they progress for blender
1 Like
i was super excited for this… but unfortunately at the moment, it works only by importing a video (drag and drop) on the 3d view…
if i set a movie as texture in a material does not work
The guy just started, and already a nice boost. NICE. Wonder by how much so far.
As in more then last stated?
Revamped support multithreaded compilation of kernels D2264 (Original patch by Lukas Stockner). BMW compilation time reduced from 55 seconds to:
- 40 seconds (
cycles.debug_opencl_kernel_single_program = True)- 20 seconds (
cycles.debug_opencl_kernel_single_program = False)
1 Like
I believe most of the work was done by Lukas. Jeroen just reviewed and tested it.
ahh, then appologies, credit is given where it’s due. Too bad that Lukas made such an amazing patch and it just sat there… 
makes one wonder what other nice work is just sitting there… waiting …
@Grzesiek tons propably, just look at the number of branches. There are lots of patches that didn’t make the way into master, and also bigger things, like gsoc projects.
1 Like
A lot of patches are sitting around because the devs. are in an all-hands-on-deck mode to (hopefully) get 2.8 released in early Spring, but that assumes 2.8 doesn’t get delayed to tackle more usability issues.
New Features and Changes
The focus continues to be on bugfixing and polishing 2.80, with about 75 bugs fixed last week.
- Wireframe display mode now supports object and random coloring of the wireframes. ( Clément Foucault )
- Subdivision surface animation playback performance was significantly improved. This is still done on the CPU, but multithreaded and caching topology that does not change between frames. ( Sergey Sharybin )
- Peak memory usage when loading large .blend files was reduced, particularly when using only parts of a linked library. ( Campbell Barton )
- The transform adjust operation panel was simplified, so it’s easier to edit values when using constraints. ( Campbell Barton )
- In the timeline, Ctrl + Home/End now set the start/end frame. ( Campbell Barton )
- Editor corner was improved with a larger hit zone and new cursors to show the operation. ( Harley Acheson )
- Cycles OpenCL kernel compilation was further optimized. For our tests scenes they are now within the 15s - 21s range, down from 55s - 210s a few weeks ago. In some cases render time is also reduced. ( Jeroen Bakker )
Development
- 2.8 homestretch workshop planned in April, to get developers together in Amsterdam and discuss user feedback, designs and planning for 2.80 and beyond. (announcement ).
Weekly Reports
14 Likes
Dang… as this is now "master’ guessing this will be in the latest builds for 2.79 and 2.8?