This years Google Summer of Code is over, and the students improved Blender in many areas. Here you can find a summary of the results. Thanks to Google for having us in this years GSoC!
Beziers Curve Editing (João Araújo)
New Bezier Tools
João worked on Blenders Beziers curves. He improved the extrusion of curves and added new tools.
- Extend tool
- Batch Extend tool
- Trim tool
- Offset tool
- Chamfer tool
- Fillet tool
More information can be found here.
The new Layer Manager
Layer Manager (Julian Eisel)
Julian worked on a new layer manager, allowing artists to easily work with layers, group them together, reorder them to organize them nicely and of course removing the limit of 20 layers. He also added tools for a meaningful color system (colored wireframes).
More information can be found here.
Cycles Denoising (Lukas Stockner)
Barcelona Pavillon, regular and denoised side by side.
Lukas worked on Cycles render denoising. It’s purpose is to remove remaining noise from rendered images while preserving more details than a compositor setup could. To do so, it collects additional information during rendering, which can either be used to denoise tiles right after they are rendered, or to denoise the image later after the rendering is completed.
More information can be found here.
PBVH Vertex Painting (Nathan Vollmer)
Vertex Blur Tool in action.
Nathan worked on Blenders vertex painting, improving painting performance (4-6x faster), adding new tools and mirroring functionality and finally splash prevention.
More information can be found here.
UV Tools (Philipp Gosch)
Improved Pack Island Tool.
Philipp improved Blenders UV Tools, especially the Pack Island tool. While a bit more computation heavy, the solutions found by the new algorithm can be way better than the old “Pack Islands” in terms of used UV space. Additionally new tools were added, like Select Shortest Vertex Path, Scale to Bounds and Select Overlapping UVs. Last but not least he made improvements to snapping and UV hiding.
More information can be found here.
Cycles Texture System (Thomas Dinges)
Lower memory usage for single channel 3D textures (e.g. Density).
Thomas worked on the Cycles texture system, increasing the maximum amount of textures that can be used on CUDA GPUs, and lowering memory usage in many cases, allowing artists to create more complex scenes. He also added HDR texture support to OpenCL devices.
More information can be found here.
Multi-view Camera Reconstruction (Tianwei Shen)
Multi-view reconstruction.
Tianwei added support for Multi-view Reconstruction into Blender. The main benefit for this new feature is to deliver robust camera reconstruction results as people on set often shoot witness clips to aid the solving of the main clip.
More information can be found here.
Manta Fluids (Sebastian Barschkis)
Liquid splash at 512 divisions. Simulated with the Mantaflow integration and rendered with Cycles.
Sebastian integrated Mantaflow liquid effects into Blender. The exisiting Mantaflow smoke integration, which builds on top of the smoke modifier, was taken as a basis and extended to handle Mantaflows FLIP based liquid effects as well.
More information can be found here.
You guys are great! I can see the layer manager becoming a powerful part of a rendering workflow.
Great work ppl.
The snaps?
Hi guys, your work is awesome !
Thanks a lot !
Great work from the all the guys. I’m really glad how much effort was put into these updates.
Super excited about all of this. How long after completion do GSOC projects make it into a new master version of Blender?
All works are great and very useful. Thank you all. The most i love is Manta fluid and texture system.
Thank all of you guys for all the effort you’ve put into these massive feature-heavy updates. My special love goes to updated UV Tools – the new island packing algorithm looks amazing. Kudos!
Amazing work from all of you! Congrats!
which ones will get to blender 2.8? I hope cycles denoising :)
The new Layer Manager look really well thought out. Excellent work from Julian.
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