Blender has officially entered the Blender 2.81 bcon2 phase. To understand what that means let’s step a little back first.
Blender 2.80
The Blender 2.80 release was really well received, and gave solid powerful new features to the entire community. The scope of the project and our development strategy, however, lead the project to stretch for a few years. On one hand there were features pouring in master continuously throughout the years, while on the other hand there were months entirely dedicated to bug fixing and fine tune polishing alone.
But how did the community react to that? What happens when the Blender developers keep a production-safe release “held hostage” until a final glorious 2.80 release? Well, the community spends the waiting years downloading, building, testing, providing feedback, and – surprise – using it for high profile events worldwide.
Were there bugs in the beta versions of Blender? Sure thing. Were there known issues in the final released 2.80? Unfortunately, yes. And yet the community was using it everywhere. Bugs aside, there were also numerous patches that were neglected.
And now it enters the new release cycle structure.
Blender 2.8x
For the 2.8x series the Blender project is back to a more strict cycle where bug fixing and new features sprints alternate back and forth:
- Bcon1 (9 weeks) starts with developers committing approved patches, or sending them for review. This is when time is allocated to assist collaborators with their work, and when the community and developers have an initial picture of what likely will be in the upcoming Blender.
- Bcon2 (4 weeks) is fully dedicated to bug triaging, fixing the high priority bugs and stabilizing the recently merged features. Thanks to the limited scope of what is merged in bcon1 the developers can really focus on delivering well polished features, while the remaining can get improved in time for the next bcon1.
- Bcon3 (4 weeks) is when things get really interesting. At the same time of the bcon3 for the current Blender release, the bcon1 for the next release starts. A new release-branch is created to leave master open for new features, while Blender project coordinators assess per-module whether the developers should work on new features or if there are high enough issues that still need attention.
- Bcon4 (1 week) is a phase where only critical commits are merged, and the community can test what will become the shipped new stable Blender release.
- Bcon5 (1-2 days) is a stage where final builds are packaged for all platforms, final tweaks to the logs and promo images, social media, video announcements, and the final switch is flicked on blender.org for the new release to show up in the Download page. Time to make some noise!
Full disclaimer, as with anything in Blender’s dynamic structure, this may change in the future, sanctioned by a developer meeting.
Blender 2.81
As mentioned before, Blender is already in bcon2, meaning that the developers have settled on what is expected to be part of Blender 2.81. From its release notes we can already glance at what is coming soon:
- New sculpt tools, poly build tool, voxel remesh and quad remesh.
- Transform origins, new snapping, mirroring and auto merge options.
- New shaders for texturing, denoising with OpenImageDenoise, and NVIDIA RTX support.
- Shadows, transparency and bump mapping redesigned for easier setup and better quality.
- New options for look development with Cycles and Eevee.
- A new system to replace proxies, to make local overrides to linked characters and other data types.
- Finer control over rotations and scale in bones, constraints and drivers.
- Outliner improvements, new file browser and batch rename.
- Many Grease Pencil improvements.
- And much more.
But don’t get too attached to these just yet. If by the end of bcon3 (or even bcon2) the blender project coordinators sense some features may still be in a rough shape, they may still pull it out of the release.
Meanwhile give the nightly builds a go and feel free to join the development efforts on finding and fixing any bugs that may be in the way.
Amazing features of blender 2.80,
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Thanks
This is Greta idea and such a good software thanks sharing this article
Thanks share this article I am reading this and use easy to blender software rea;;y good information and help us
Was getting confused in the tutorials of blenders your article helped me a lot I am blending images for my website please let me know there is any mistake or clarity.
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A debt of gratitude is in order for the article! I knew nothing about this “bcon” stuff (fascinating). A debt of gratitude is in order for your persistent effort Blender Team! 😀
No doubt, blender is the best software for making the best models. I like this article.
Great reading for blender software. Its really easy to use blender software.
Amazing features of blender 2.80,
Thanks
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This is really a great article about blending cycle.
This is really great reading about blending cycle. Blender is really amazing software for me. Thank you for sharing it.
This is really a great blender article. Blender is my favorite software. And I’m trying to improve my skill with blender. Thank you for sharing this article.
I’d like to thank you for the efforts you’ve put in penning this blog of blender release cycle. I really hope to view the same high-grade blog posts from you later on as well. In fact, your creative writing abilities has encouraged me to get my own blog now
I’m just now reading the full tutorial and I love it! I still can’t believe how you dreamed this up Everything you do is so true to your style and this is no exception. Well done friend. keep posting..
it works all fine, but what happens is when I go to edit mode and upon adding a loop cut, it becomes all laggy which is what I have encountered so far.
re: https://developer.blender.org/D6392
Apart from coding, testing and documenting and assuming the subscribers/reviewers are getting pinged, is there anything more I should be doing to get this code included in a future release? Dates I should be aware of?
Great To Read <3
2.81 drops 32-bit supports for all platforms?
Should we users download 2.81 already? Or is it too raw still?
I’d like for the team to try to fix the subdivision surface performance issues upon editing. When adding the subdivision surface modifier, it works all fine, but what happens is when I go to edit mode and upon adding a loop cut, it becomes all laggy which is what I have encountered so far. Other than that great job guys.
This. Just standard Sub-D modelling has become way slower than before.
There has to be a solution, and I’m not stuck on an old machine either…
https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-downloads
https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-toolkit-release-notes/index.html
“v10.2.89”
Can Blender be updated to CUDA 10.2 for post 2.81 releases?
I am Sorry, What I meant to say is that I agree with Cobra, I am legally blind so I some times get things mixed up when I read them. No offence to IIk.
I am new to blender but I agree with IIK. I have been a Max user for almost 20 years and I have just switched to Blender. Max in the beginning was fun but then Autodesk starting having a new release every year and every year they would have a big release and you would have to get use to the new features along with the new bugs and it would disrupt your work. there were third party plugins that would work with the new releases of max and Autodesk put a lot of third party developers out of business. They were buying up companies to ad there plugins to Max. There was a joke, If you cant beat them buy them. They don’t have a lot of programmers so max has been really buggy. But a lot of people stick with it because they don’t want to start all over. I remember in the early 2000’s I use to frequent the 3D Cafe. Most of the users were using Max and some Maya but there was one kid that was using B lender.His stuff was really neat but not up to par with Max. About a year ago a friend of mine who is also a Max user, told me about blender. He said I need to check it out. I was really impressed with the videos I saw about it I guess I was kind of blown away by what I saw. All of the things you could do inside of Blender just put Max to shame in my opinion. That was release 2.79. I jumped ship and decided to learn Blender. I was really Frustrated with it because of the interface. It wasn’t like any thing I had used before. Then blender 2.8 came out and It makes sense to me. with this release I was excited because it wasn’t as buggy as Max. Blender has been like a breath of fresh air especially knowing that the blender community really cares about there software. and wan’t it to be a quality program. Even though there are people out there that are cumming up with some really neat Ideas for Blender and helpful tools you still need to take the time to debug it. If you just start pumping these things out one after another I think that the quality could drop. I think the developers are right on. That is just my opinion. Be careful of what you wish for. I don’t know if Blender will ever be the industry standard, but it should be. Blenders Rocks! Thank you to the developers for making my switch to blender a pleasurable one.
I believe Blender needs to interop more with other DCC packages and industry standarts (good way is full USD support) no studio is going to use Blender for EVERYTHING.
To be honest I think 2.79 was fantastic and I’ve stuck with that as lots of my plugins didn’t work with 2.80 and the latter left me kind of bewildered anyway with all the changes. I guess it depends on just how realistic you need things to be, or how fast you need to work. I’ll try 2.81 when it’s declared completely stable and the plugins I need like Animall all work, but I’m in no rush.
Please, please do something to support Metal 2 on Mac OS. Yes, I’ve read all the explanations—and I still say, if there is will, there is a way. It BF themselves can’t manage it, maybe Apple would: after all, Blender is a good marketing vehicle to promote their new API. It doesn’t have to be free, either: just reasonably priced.
But please, please don’t force me and other Mac Blenderheads on Windows. It’s bad enough that Apple can’t resolve their kindergarten spat with NVIDIA and at the very least, support the NVIDIA cards in eGPUs: I’d hate to think that BF is also succumbing to the ideology epidemics (like, ‘good’ open source vs. ‘evil’ corporations), while the users suffer.
I agree with Anarchymedes. Blender must consider Metal support if not directly possible then at least in some other ways. Many studios like me use macs, and we also use blender.
I agree please support MEtal form Mac is so selfish to say multiplatform and mac is abandoned make justice for mac users please.
Thanks for the article! I didn’t know anything about this “bcon” stuff (very interesting). Thanks for your hard work Blender Team! :D :D :D
I like that Bcon3 and Bcon1 of next release co-exist. Hopefully it will allow delivering new releases faster without sacrificing quality of final releases :) Thanks for the explaining this!
There is a serious problem when editing and undo on heavy poly mesh, so far not seen you guys do anything about it, blender wouldn’t be true industry standard as long as you don’t fix it
They are obviously aware of that.
You know something like ‘Report a Bug’ exists right?
it has been reported long ago, even from 2.7x
There’s a whole branch dedicated only to undo so they’re working hard to fix that
Link of that branch please. Thanx for the info.
What blender is doing is nothing but good!!!, as far as problems you will always have them, just thank god we have software that’s a step in the right direction, imagine all those companies/people that have bought Autodesk maya/3ds max and are still having a problem that they can’t get fixed.
I honestly think these releases are too far apart. Especially when some components of the next release are stable and working already. A constant drip update would be better than big bucket full updates every few months. It would give users quicker access to new features and it would mean developers wouldn’t have to dedicate a big release cycle to bug fixes. They can just focus on bug fixing small components and releasing them when they’re ready, old version naming be damned
do you want buggy, unstable software? because that’s how you get it.
I agree with Testure here, it’s the same reason why you never see Adobe or (most) major videogame companies doing it. The only platform that does this would be the phone apps, those things constantly update to the point where each update feels like a bland change to one or two mechanics.
There’s two separate things here. The frequency of releases, and how long it takes from a feature to go from implementation to a release.
For stability of big new features, I think we really need those 2-3 months from initial commit to release. Something that works entirely fine for one user often causes problems for another. There are also steps like writing documentation and translation that need time.
Firefox has been on a 6-8 weeks release schedule and is now switching to monthly. That’s accomplished by having 3 branches in development at any given time. We’re trying 2 now and will see how it goes. Maybe it works well and we can release more frequently. It would help get minor changes and bug fixes released faster.
But there is also a significant cost to managing that kind of thing. Firefox has a release engineering team of 13 people, which is almost as big as our development team as a whole. We wouldn’t need that many, but we don’t even have 1 developer fully dedicated to this task.
What Blender developers doing is right IMO, 3 to 4 months is the sweet spot new features need testing and fixing if you get like 2-3 releases that would be overwhelming for people as you have to install new versions on top of each other all the time, if users want latest features then they should either download the buildbot builds or compile blender themselves, Persoanlly i don’t even mind if releases are 6 months apart that means tons of features who got polished before they are ready to use for actual projects.
Agree with 6 months if that will result in more polished features.
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