Render Modules Update

The Blender development team keeps growing, and we are in the process of improving the organization and hiring new employees to accommodate this. For me personally, this provides an opportunity to focus again on what I’m most passionate about.

My new role – as principal engineer – will be focusing on rendering development in Blender, and I will spend most of my time as a software developer working on Cycles again.

My previous role was as chief software architect for Blender. I will continue to be available for advice on software design for any part of Blender. But I will no longer be as much involved in organizing, reviewing or signing off on development projects outside of rendering.

---

There were two rendering module teams in Blender:

• Render & Cycles: includes Cycles, Blender render pipeline, color management, materials, textures, etc.
• Eevee & Viewport: includes Eevee, 3D viewport drawing, OpenGL & Vulkan.

These will be merged into a single Rendering module team. This is an organizational change, and one that has already happened for the most part. We’ve been holding weekly rendering meetings for planning and discussion of both modules, and will continue to do so.

Note that Cycles and Eevee remain separate renderers. We will to work together to ensure feature compatibility and make changes that benefit both native and external renderers.

The module owners are Clément Foucault, Jeroen Bakker and myself. Adding Jeroen as a module owner reflects his existing high involvement in both modules, and together with Clément his focus is on the Eevee & Viewport part.

For Cycles there are various active individuals and companies contributing to the module. Kévin Dietrich is currently working on Cycles with a grant for specific interactive rendering optimizations, and we’re also looking to hire another developer for general Cycles and Blender render pipeline development.

---

Rendering is an area that benefits from long term continued improvement. We have much work to do lowering render times, handling bigger scenes, simplifying settings, adding more advanced and easy to use shaders, and good interop with the rest of Blender and other apps. In the end it’s all about making an idea into a beautiful render as seamless as possible.

We are looking for artist module members to join the rendering modules, particularly to help test new features, make demo files, and create release notes and docs. More developers are also always welcome, especially to help with bug fixing, code review and incremental quality of life improvements.

– Brecht Van Lommel