Hi everyone,
I’m happy to share the first public Beta (0.6) of my custom Blender VFX build, focused on production-oriented features for compositing and pipeline work.
What’s in this release:
- Deep EXR output for Cycles (CPU only / GPU WIP)
- New anti-aliased Z-depth pass with volume support (CPU only / GPU WIP)
$VARenvironment variable expansion across all path fields (Asset Library, output paths, etc.)- Qt (PySide6) integration with a lightweight Qt server running inside Blender
- Bug fix: click-drag node selection
- Bug fix: Volume shadows not appearing when a volume is in an “Indirect Only” collection and intersects other objects.
Please read the documentation before reporting issues, most edge cases and known limitations are covered there.
This is a Beta, and I’d really appreciate feedback from anyone willing to test it in with real production assets. Bug reports, edge cases, and workflow feedback are all valuable at this stage.
GitHub: https://github.com/MattRM2/MattRM2_VFX_Build
If you know someone in the VFX/Blender pipeline space who might find this useful, feel free to point them this way.
The purpose of this build is to serve as a platform to later submit the code to the Blender Foundation, with the hope of getting the following features integrated:
- Deep (CPU/GPU)
- New Z-depth with volume support (CPU/GPU)
- $VAR in all paths
- DeepID
- LPE
This build will continue to be maintained afterward for certain specific points, but my primary goal is to push Cycles, which is already excellent, to the level of commercial production renderers. This is something Blender is currently missing on the Cycles side.
Thanks to everyone testing early builds, your input shapes where this goes next. A roadmap is also on the GitHub page.
