so tested the latest blender beta and i have a huge 2.5x times faster animation playback with subdivision surface!!! amazing
3 Likes
Well, the previous blender2.8 branch is now master, so I wouldn’t count on having the opencl improvements in the 2.79 builds. You can try though.
Nice. I do hope the focus will soon be pointed towards viewport speedups, particularly Vertex Paint mode slows down a lot beyond half a million polygons.
3 Likes
Posting this since no one else seems to be today. For some reason, Bastien doesn’t seem to have a log link this week.
4 March 2019
New Features and Changes
About 85 bugs were fixed last week.
- Grease pencil gained support for wireframe mode, direct selection in the 3D viewport without the dummy, a new stroke trim tool, and various usability tweaks and optimizations. ( Antonio Vazquez )
- 3D cursor rotation can now be edited in the 3D view sidebar. ( Hans Goudey, Campbell Barton )
- Outliner can now duplicate collections with objects included. ( Dalai Felinto )
- Object visibility can be animated again. ( Sergey Sharybin )
- Armature wireframe drawing is supported again. ( Clément Foucault )
- Texture paint bleeding has been improved, solving spiky artifacts that existed before. ( Luca Rood )
- .blend file loading has been improved by 18% in some production files. ( Campbell Barton )
Development
- Blender got accepted to participate in Google Summer of Code again. Students are welcome to ask questions on devtalk.blender.org or the bf-committers mailing list. (info , email )
Weekly Reports
7 Likes
11 March 2019
New Features and Changes
About 115 bugs were fixed in the last week, along with a few smaller improvements:
- Paint and sculpt modes now have basic context menus (RMB or W key) with brush controls, more to follow. ( William Reynish )
- Many small user interface naming and layout tweaks to improve usability. ( William Reynish , Pablo Vazquez )
- The image editor view mode now has sample and annotation tools. ( Campbell Barton )
- Application icons on Linux and file icons on macOS have been updated. ( Jakub Steiner , William Reynish )
- Cycles can now store UVs more efficiently, reducing overall memory by 6.5% in an Agent 327 production scene. ( Stefan Werner )
- Cycles renders now have metadata about synchronization and path tracing time, in addition to the total render time. ( Sergey Sharybin )
- Viewport preferences now have a setting to disable anti-aliasing for edit mode wireframes. ( Clément Foucault )
- Loading of .blend files from different Blender versions (even slightly older ones) has been optimized, tested to be 18% faster on one production file. ( Campbell Barton )
Development
- Discussion about which GPUs we can support for the final 2.80 release is ongoing, it’s clear that the requirements are more complicated than “OpenGL 3.3 or higher”. This is mainly due to some graphics drivers or older operating systems no longer getting important bugfixes, even if the hardware can work correctly with a different or newer operating system. A topic to decide on at the Homestretch Sprint.
Weekly Reports
6 Likes
New Features and Changes
About 130 bugs were fixed in the last week.
- Subdivision surface performance when transforming in edit mode was improved. The topology is now cached for faster updates. Performance of editing topology is still not as fast as before, however. ( Sergey Sharybin )
- Cycles CUDA render performance has been improved by 5-20% on production scenes, due to better thread scheduling. ( Stefan Werner )
- Cycles OpenCL viewport render now shows an ambient occlusion preview render until the kernels are fully compiled, to keep the viewport interactive. Kernel re-compilation on changes is needed less often as more features are always enabled. ( Jeroen Bakker )
- Shader node editor: panels with light and world settings in the sidebar, as was already available for materials. ( Brecht Van Lommel )
- Preferences: new settings to display factors as percentages throughout the user interface. ( Jacques Lucke )
- Help > Report Bug now automatically fills the bug reporting form with system and Blender info, we recommend users to use this for complete and accurate info. ( Ray Molenkamp )
- Windows builds now include batch files for easily running Blender with debug log output. The resulting log files can be attached to bug reports. ( Ray Molenkamp )
- X3D add-on: now available in 2.8 again. ( Bastien Montagne )
- Python API: there is now an API for add-ons to register tools in the toolbar. Example code is available as a template in the text editor. ( Campbell Barton )
- Python API:
ShaderNodeCustomGroupwas added to define custom node groups for Cycles and Eevee. Works the same as existingNodeCustomGroup. ( Miguel Porces )
Development
- Cycles now uses CUDA toolkit 10.1 as the officially supported version, we recommend upgrading for best performance and stability.
- In the bug tracker, developers are encouraged to look also at older reports marked as Need Information or Need Triangle. Also to mark important older bugs as high priority so they get attention.
Weekly Reports
10 Likes
Need Triangle. That cracked me up. xP
“Triangle Not Found”
All reports marked “Need Triangle” have been dismissed due to user error. Those who need triangles should start Blender first, then you may enjoy all the triangles your heart desires.
1 Like
Any news about the realtime phyiscs mode? Its now in development for half a year or more.
New Features and Changes
About 115 bugs were fixed last week.
- Renaming selected objects in the 3D viewport and items in other editors can now be done quickly with the F2 key shortcut. The file context menu for quickly doing operations like link/append moved to F4. ( Campbell Barton )
- New copy/paste functionality for any data-block in the outliner, to copy them between .blend files or duplicate them. ( Bastien Montagne )
- The shader editor got a material slot selector in the header, so materials can be edited completely without the properties editor. ( Hans Goudey )
- Sculpt and painting brush settings have been reorganized, along with many other small naming and layout tweaks in the interface. ( William Reynish )
- Modifiers: add minimum number of vertices to triangulate modifier. ( Ish Bosamiya )
- Cycles now has an operator to merge images rendered with different sample range. This
cycles.merge_imagesoperator is intended for render farm scripts, and uses specific rules to combine passes and metadata to works well for Cycles. ( Brecht Van Lommel )
Development
- clang-format support is getting closer to finished. There is now documentation and a script to merge/rebase branches. We mainly still need better Windows support and some decisions on code style.
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Tools/ClangFormat
Weekly Reports
7 Likes
The F2 renaming and the copy and pasting between files is very useful. 
4 Likes
Will that help that a fix of something does not break something else by accident?
What about keyframing collections render visibility?
Imo this is a must have here. We can do collections, and then animate its visibility. Example? Product animation rendering, which need to be send to a renderfarm, to not have too much separate files to work on. Especially when lighting is very similar, or environment. And for many other scenarios.
So when collections visibility (bot for viewport, and render will be available for keyframing)?
1 Like
it helps new developer by automating the formatting and code style for them, instead of spending days of back and forth in review over code style…
3 Likes
+1 I literally posted about how renaming seemed more difficult in 2.8, and now it’s easier than ever! No more “Cube.067” for every single object in the scene!
2 Likes
It would be good if we could rename multiple selected objects. Perhaps by pressing alt-Enter after entering the new name.
So that when entering a new name in the F2 box while having multiple objects selected and pressing alt-Enter it will name the objects "newName.000, newName.001, newName.002 " and so on.
7 Likes
I like that idea. But would rather propose shift f2. Like ‘big (capital ) rename’.
Edit: Thinking again… Do we even need a modifier when multiple objects are selected anyway? Should be automated.
1 Like
To your edit: I definitely don’t think so! Selection should be the context. If you select multiple files and hit ‘rename’, it’s my expectation that they will all be renamed, with ‘Alt’ possibly being able to invert it. As I understand it, this was decided on by the devs as well, but it doesn’t seem to be implemented everywhere yet…
3 Likes
Erm, isn’t that what I said? My second thought was:
If multiple objects are already selected and I press f2 to rename, then all selected objects should be renamed.
Or are you talking about the new-name + increment? Do you think they all should have the exact same name?