2021 promises to be a busy and exciting year. We will be working on the second LTS release and on Blender 3.0, which includes a lot of new development. This year also marks the 10th anniversary of Cycles.
There will be more emphasis on the modules as a way for everyone in the development community to get involved. Combined with the Blender HQ project teams, this should help bootstrap new and existing initiatives while making sure they are maintained in the long run.
Planning
The year began by assigning three core developer teams to focus for two months on the following projects: asset browser and pose library, library overrides, and geometry nodes. This began in February and will be wrapped up soon.
Blender 2.93 will be released in late May. Much like version 2.83, this will be an LTS (Long-term Support) release, meaning it will be maintained for two years.
Q2 also sees the kick-off of the animation character pipeline project — pending unforeseen restrictions.
NVIDIA’s Industry quality work done for the USD importer is already being reviewed. It should debut after Blender 2.93 is released.
Coming in early summer: a usability workshop will be held in Amsterdam with Blender designer William Reynish and other UI/UX contributors — all in preparation for Blender 3.0.
Projects
- Asset browser and pose library
- Library overrides
- Geometry nodes
- Vulkan
- Grease Pencil
- Blender 2.93 LTS
- Cycles development
- Animation character pipeline
- USD importer
- Blender 3.0 – user interface workshop
Asset browser and pose library
The asset browser project dates back to 2016 (when it was called asset management). Over the years and multiple iterations, its goals narrowed. But since February, the project has been rebooted with a broader set of goals.
For years the Blender Studio has needed a robust pose library system for its animation projects. Sprite Fright provided the perfect opportunity to address this while also helping the asset browser project.
It’s likely that the pose library system will become the first target for the asset browser project. It will be completely integrated in both the viewport and animation editors, and help focus the asset browser project in time for Blender 3.0.
Library overrides
Replacing the old animation proxy system remains a work in progress. As part of this process, the current development cycle aims to finish rigging syncing, and wrap up the system’s final documentation.
Sprite Fright is the first Open Movie to use the library overrides system. This helps stress test support for multiple animated instances of the same character.
This initial polishing cycle will be followed by another project to tackle the restrictive pipeline. At that time riggers will be able to hand-pick which properties animators are allowed to override. This still depends on finding interested studios for testing and feedback — as well as someone to help with UI/UX.
Geometry Nodes
The second project related to geometry nodes has just ended. It expanded on the initial project by adding new nodes and ways for artists to work with this system. This eight week-long cycle had four pillars:
- Wrapping up Blender Studio requirements, and polishing.
- Everything nodes design.
- Attribute workflow.
- Node tools.
Twenty new geometry nodes were introduced. These include the long-awaited mesh primitives, plus more advanced scattering, procedural modelling options, and a new texture based pipeline. A brand-new spreadsheet was added to help debug complex node trees. Besides, the project added usability improvements such as attribute search and error messages.
A few sprints were also dedicated to design and prototyping, helping to prepare the ground for future projects. This included collection nodes, re-validation of the hair nodes design, node tools, pages and portals.
Vulkan
The drawing backend is being prepared to receive Vulkan. This abstraction of the drawing API will allow Blender to use more modern libraries for drawing. Which also helps make EEVEE memory more efficient.
It’s worth noting that there are no immediate performance boosts expected from Vulkan’s integration. However, it will help make Blender future proof and ready for vendor-specific platforms.
Grease Pencil
The 2D drawing tools in Blender got a big improvement with the recently added Line Arts.
The emphasis this year was on new Line Art modifiers, storyboarding, I/O, better bézier editing and features for 2D/2.5D animation feature films.
Blender 2.93 LTS
The Long-term Support pilot was a success with 13 versions in one year, and hundreds of ported fixes. Downloads were in the hundreds of thousands. The second LTS will come in April.
Blender 2.83 LTS will be maintained for another year, while 2.93 LTS will be maintained for two years. The long-term stable releases will receive fixes for high priority bugs and regressions, besides drivers compatibility updates.
Cycles development
Through industry support, Cycles saw big improvements in its render API thanks to a dedicated developer working closely with Facebook.
Following that, the Blender project is hiring a new senior rendering engineer to help the Cycles team. The hiring process is almost complete.
The 10th anniversary of Cycles is on April 23rd. To celebrate, Blender is working on a special surprise. Save the date!
Animation character pipeline
Feature film production is a real challenge. The scale alone brings unique problems that go beyond mere performance improvements. Specific tools are required in order to create a streamlined workflow, helping the entire team maintain the same level quality.
In the past, this project was put on hold due to lack of industry support. It required both a talented multi-disciplinary team and funding in order to bring everyone onboard. Happily, we now have both! Industry veteran Jason Schleifer will act as the liaison for this project.
The pose library and library overrides are part of the tools expected for this pipeline. However better tools for rigging, playback and animation in generation will also be tackled.
USD importer
NVIDIA is involved in bringing USD support to Blender. Developer Michael Kowalski is working directly with the rest of the Blender development team in order to make this happen.
The initial plan is to focus on USD importing. As the exporter code was already in place, this seemed like the obvious place to start. Michael’s work is currently under review with the aim of incorporating it into the Blender 3.0 release.
The importer is built on top of the existing I/O pipeline. However Collections for I/O has also been discussed and may become part of the USD integration.
Blender 3.0 – user interface workshop
Finally on the agenda is a workshop to ensure that the Blender 3 series is implemented with all the necessary care.
The Blender development team is working towards a Blender 3.0 release in the Q3, probably in September. As always when it comes to major releases, we’ll take the time to revise some of Blender’s design choices and introduce big solutions to existing issues.
As soon as international travelling is again possible, there will be a UI/UX workshop in Amsterdam. The goal is to find outstanding solutions to pressing problems.
Surprises
There is value in solid planning. However not everything should be set on stone ahead of time. There are plenty of other projects expected for 2021. But they will be revealed throughout the year. The idea for the core team is to work in 6-8 week long projects, hand over to the modules, rinse and repeat.
The short cycle — alternated with weeks regular module development — will help more projects see the light of day. This also ensures that the development team can remain nimble and pick the best projects to tackle at a given time. This keeps priorities fresh and planning realistic.
As a teaser, here are a few ideas being considered:
- Independent physics clock in viewports
- Mesh editing optimization
- Brush manager for painting and sculpting
- Snapping improvements
- Real time viewport video compositor
- Collections settings for persistent I/O and baking
- Restrictive overrides
- Collection nodes
- Dynamic particles
I personally hope you guys put more effort into rigging both in terms of performance and tools.
it’s a bit sad that this part was always tleft at the back, Blender is the only software that struggles with more complex rigs also it’s tools and features are cumbersome like shape keys in that pathetic small list, forget about having hundreds or thousands of them you can’t even select/delete multipe shapekeys at once without doing some scripting which will take as much time as deleting them one by one.
Does this roadmap by any chance include more hair clump options anywhere? People who do fur grooming in Blender desperately need the option to divide larger hair clumps into several smaller clumps — a feature Maya has had for years. As it is, it’s almost impossible to get realistic looking fur without making far too many particle systems, slowing down animation render times by a lot.
I can’t not wait for the new Character Animation Pipeline.
Blender needs to push for better rigging & animation workflows with special focus on Facial Animation, I think it’s one of blender’s weakest areas so far along side the deformation.
So hopefull with AWS interest in this topic we’ll get something better than what’s available for Maya :)
Add that in the roadmap please :
https://blender.community/c/rightclickselect/Rcbbbc/?sorting=hot
The joke lasted to long.
This is THE most needed feature EVER and Blender is still missing it… It’s such a shame you can’t even realize how important it is to implement this, more important than any other things you planned.
1. Light linking
2. Proper shadow catcher
3. Organize addon tab mess (N key panel)
4. Sync outliner with viewport selection. When object is selected, outliner scrolls to it as well.
That is all from me. Keep up the good work!
Please fix the very core features which every 3D artist needs and which other features rely on – namely Edit Mesh (performance is really terrible in case of little larger meshes), Weight / Vertex Paint performance (V. Paint is even slower than in 2.79!), UV editor should deserve some care too.
Grease Pencil is cool, but please let’s make sure this 3D app can handle basic 3D tasks (and some real = more complex 3D projects) properly first.
Thanks!
I guat dfghjcvghi
hi , i ‘m rasol , i live in iran and i love blender very much , becase it is free and huge 2d & 3d software.
When you are going to add some feature such as dynamic,particles , destruction , etc in everthing nodes project?
Nice.
I’m deep into motion graphics (tv/internet ads, music video clips, vj loops, …) so I use animation nodes pretty heavily. One problem is the impossibility to keyframe animation nodes parameters, will you come up with a solution in the future and allow custom node properties to be keyframed?
You also need to make it easier to code custom compositor nodes , as far as I’m aware, it’s not possible to write new ones directly in Python?
Anyway, I hope something like Animation Nodes will eventually be added directly within Blender, or at the very least it will become some official add-on. Keep up the good work.
I’d really like to see Eevee continue, and with much better shadows rendering (fractals not wanted, prefer smooth, continuous curves and some [definable] degrees of anti-aliasing). Not everything should be warm & fuzzy ray-hug, so to speak.
Huge amounts of work to do — not enough people going to it, it seems — sounds like an ongoing balancing act in several dimensions. Is it all supposed to empty into ‘the 1%s” pockets?
How about orienting the gimbal (or, the xyz-axes) with one or two dimensions picked by the user? I have found that most of the options for the transformation orientation are — mystical, mysterious. I would like to pick a long, short, and (if needed or wanted) Z direction instead, for a ‘user-defined’ or ‘object-particular’ gridframe (right-hand-rule). Please.
Is there any planning for Hair DYNAMICS?
Where is performance?
Is there any development for the architectural direction?
Everythings nodes is awesome! Could you also add more procedural pattern options like Hexatiles, Herringbone, Chevron, Basketweave and etc?
Would love to see the implementation of the Volumetric Soft Body Simulator from the GSOC2020.
I understand that it is wasn’t merged due to the need for proper tetgen and a few other things, but fixing the broken softbody sim and giving it proper volumetrics would be outstanding. It is especially necessary in skin simulation and plush or rubbery objects. Being able to simulate fat jiggle, skin stretch, and impact deformation without relying on more roundabout and often broken methods would be the biggest thing after performance improvements.
Like other people have said please give some love to fast highpoly editing.
https://developer.blender.org/T73360
And gpu accelerated Subdiv seeing that Blender 2.79 had it.
https://developer.blender.org/T68996
After the recent boost in cycles these would be most excellent!!!!!
Also most blender user’s life’s will improve!!!
Texto 3d
FANTASTIC!!!
I’m excited about all the things, and can’t wait for another year of awesome Blender design and development!
With all these new features I think Blender might be… going to the MOON! (I am not a financial advisor)
I only have one feature request, KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!
please do rig performance updates too if possible
Is there interest in supporting a Metal version of Cycles X for MacOS?
Please, try to port Cycles X to MacOS 🙏🙏🙏
Hell yeah.. yes please!
I hope to give amd’s gpu quickly do new api I’m waiting to use
Please look at the creation of God. There is an infinity plane/water for sea, a horizon and a sky. After this we need a terrain generator with realistic materials and textures.
Dynamic particles would be cool. But seriously, clean up the UI. + adds and – subtracts perhaps we can have this simple implementation applied to all aspects of the software hmm?
wow – the amount of whining about lack of development just blows my mind.
Dev’s you’re doing an amazing job – the last 6 months alone have seen fantastic progress.
For an open source free software to have such a clever fundatmental design which allows genuinely programatiic approaches to scene construction – nice one.
Coming from the world of Maya, which is essentially dead code, blender is an absolute godsend.
Keep up the stellar work!
Thanks!
This is a great plan!!! i like it
I hope cycles can give amd’s rnda2 support to open Ray Tracing, next door prorender on opencl to achieve the goal of doubling the rendering efficiency, in addition to support rocm of course the best, really not opencl + Ray Tracing can also be.
Hello, unless mistaken Python-generated compositing nodes can only be node groups for now and those groups cannot accept an input image socket in order to image-process it in Python and output a modified image. This blocks the implementation of a G’MIC Python binding-based node type, with at best Python-generated node UIs. All of G’MIC’s ~800 filters scripts (possibly as many Blender compositing nodes could be generated) are synchronized to the users from an online Github database named gmic-community, each yielding different settings UI (drop-down, scalar value, color..).
I see that the “Real time viewport video compositor” feature is slated for the upcoming projects. The ability to have Python-programmed node groups to input 1 or more images for Python-based image processing would be nice and maybe not huge to implement beforehand. It would also enable Python image processing developers to create new node types without editing C/C++.
As long as the modifier stack direction is flipped the other way up so it makes logical sense like 90% every other app that use layering systems out there I’ll be happy 😊
Would be interested in helping UX/UI work…Overrides indicated it needs some. I have 3D background in AR/VR IDEs and worked on AutoCAD. Wonder how to get involved…
no VR development? :(
Is there a chance for participating in the UI/UX workshops on our own dime?
2022 Animation pipeline! Very much looking forward to it!
Compositor improvements please!!!
Editing masks directly in the compositor needs to happen, just like Nuke/Fusion.
And of course speed improvements. I have a fairly good machine but I can’t even work with HD images…
The one thing that needs work is armatures. Blender remains the oddball in the 3D industry with how it handles skeletons, they need to make the change to the industry standard (ie: Maya). We shouldn’t need to rely on add-ons to convert blender armatures into skeletons that work properly in Unreal, Unity, etc.
I believe it is the job of exporters to write things down in a conventionally agnostic way.
Especially performance, i just tested it with the new UE5 Character ‘Echo’, i exported the mesh (480k polys) & the skeleton to both Blender & Maya and unfortunately blender performed poorly with just deformed bones, if it was properly rigged it’ll probably get even worse, while in Maya it’s super fast and u can use Viewport 2.0 with lighting, shadows, AA, SS..etc with no issues..I’m afraid if this continues blender will be left out in the area of performance for animated Characters both in Games & VFX as more polys are used.
There is to much talking and no delivering.
Please concentrate on Performance and Stability, both is a joke atm.
Why not switch Blender 100% to USD, its open Standard and has all the features.
No need for Library overrides, USD has it build in.
You have the chance for 3.0 to make a cut, throw all the old 90 code out and build something for 21.
First you need a rock solid base layer. Blender is a big chaotic puzzle, with no direction atm.
This is an amazing and ambitious list! Looking forward to it!
However, there is nothing mentioned about performance improvements in the viewport when editing large meshes or many objects. This much more important than all the new features as it takes a long time to make simple edits in big scenes, undo, moving around, etc.
I’m so excited for all the new features! Some ideas: Snapping for the spin tool, bring back blender game engine, and customizable UI for various uses like if someone wants to hide all the game engine tools.
guys! all we need node base good texturing and material workspace for texture painting
* Node base Texture brushes
* Simple Node For Procedural shading (ex: Layers, Mask, pattern, etc.)
* Easy Normal Mapping
So we don’t need to jump over other software.
We already have some of these features, see this – https://cloud.blender.org/training/procedural-shading/.
Actually no, it’s not the same at all.
The course you’ve been referring to is about procedural shaders which are evaluated real-time on each pixel of the final image. Procedural textures on the other hand is a method of generating static (i.e. generated before the main render loop)images that would be fed to principled bsdf or any other shader and not involve any per-pixel or other computations real-time.
These textures would give significant performance boosts due to their “baked” nature and would allow so much wanted blur effects and much more and would be much easier to proceed since it’s a 2d based workflow with no relation to concrete objects, their object spaces etc.
Actually we have such texture nodes but these were long time deprecated and not working properly. Atm these can be used as brush textures only and as I assume only as a legacy option.
And this situation is very frustrating to be honest since all that shader nodes magic is so much overkill for most of the things people needs generated textures for. And we’been in this situation for years now :(
You can just bake the textures, use plugins like simple bake.
And your point is?
That’s would not solve the problem at hand: quickly generate textures via procedural means for ease of use and much more performant shaders. The current way of doing procedure materials in blender is cumbersome and complicated. Hell, to create a simple rectangle shape you would need a dozen nodes where in substance designer and likes it would need one single node to use. Even worse — to draw such a shape(In blender itself or in any other raster image editor) would be a quicker way of doing so. Or scattering etc.
And that’s I’m not even start rambling about blurring textures inside node trees(i.e. none-destructively). Simply put it’s not possible by any means. The best shot you can have is to fake it by dithering but it’s not the same in a such great number of ways it’s not even worth talk about.
I hope cycles can give amd’s rnda2 support to open Ray Tracing, next door prorender on opencl to achieve the goal of doubling the rendering efficiency, in addition to support rocm of course the best, really not opencl + Ray Tracing can also be.
This all awsome !
People, don’t forget that there is a lot of legacy code inside Blender still…
Not everything can be improve in weeks or even one year. It takes time.
Even, we have Eevee, greace pencil, geometry node, sculping… and many more upgrade.
Give them time (and money) !
Thanks for the perspective :)
any eevee improvement for more realistics ?
There is an upcoming (next week probably) article about EEVEE’s future. Stay tuned.
A month has passed since then, and there was no news about the eevee article…
Would love to see an update on the camera composition guides, I’d like to see more composition guides, or even simpler, give us the opportunity to import our own composition guides!!
Wish list:
– hotkeying HDRI rotation (and other slider inputs in the UI)
– Custom tool shelf/pie menus
– Hotkey editor actually warns you when assigning and overlapping hotkey
Would love to see that shapekeys could also adjust the aramature.
Speaking of the UI/UX i hope you polish Blender’s 3d Manipulators and make them more usable like any other 3d Software and figure out a better solution to the sidebar & the addons there, that’s at least my hope for 3.0.
Usability workshop… nothing about taking user feedback into account because Blender has something like 4-5 different inlets for collecting feedback, but 0 methods for documenting and turning it into something usable (and it shows so clearly from the still extremely beginner hostile and all the way up to intermediate unfriendly UI). :(
Hi eobet,
Blender user feedback happens via the modules, in particular with artists involved as stakeholders. Some specific projects reach out for the wider use base every now and then to help with testing.
The usability workshop is intended to revisit the 2.8x design assumptions now that they have been used for some time already. As with any other usability/ui workshops artists from at least the Blender Studio will be involved.
Please note how I said “beginner” and “intermediate”. Blender Studio artists are hopefully experts, and they get used to/find workarounds/forget bad UI. Ton Roosendaal himself said about a year or two ago that he would like a beginner mode (or something to that effect) in Blender, but just allowing someone to re-design some of the clearly implemented-by-engineers UI would go a long way, but then we’re back to the problem of Blender ignoring feedback from anyone who isn’t already an expert. Blender has the same elitist attitude towards novice users that computer engineers from the 1980s had. Get over it!
No Blender Game Engine, as always.
Why would there be? BGE was completely removed for 2.8+
It’s gone, time to move on :)
I wish they could add BGE back :(
These plans sound like really fun projects to get into. Hope this year will continue to have support from many community developers.
On a sidenote though. I think it’ so weird how in these comments people always ask for features and even demand for blender to be changed for their specific needs. Quite disturbing tbh…
Anyway thanks for the nice article :)
Asking for features will always be there, this actual shows that people care and want what’s better. nothing wrong with that.
Now doing it here or somewhere else that’s a different topic.
I hope the Pose Library would be a full fledged addon like Studio library , I believe someone did port it to blender in the past & showed a demo but wasn’t available to the public.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJvxlGpYc1o
It seems texturing and baking are getting neglected for yet another year. How disappointing.
This is all fantastic to see, though I have to admit I’m a bit disappointed to not see any mention of VR since the last update promised huge updates to VR. I feel like after we got a half-hearted pass at OpenXR in view-only mode everything went radio silent. Is this still a big initiative for 2021 or is it backburnered?
VR (via OpenXR) is an on-going project, one that is developed and pushed forward by the community. The only reason it is not part of the official roadmap it is because involves resources outside of the core Blender team.
That said there is time in the roadmap reserved for code review and design discussions. To follow the great work done by Peter Kim check: https://developer.blender.org/D9124
– Is USD going to be supported as a runtime to be able to handle overrides, payloads, arbitrary schema, layers ? Or only a IO thing ?
– Is Hydra part of that integration ?
Cheers
F.
The project lead by NVIDIA is focusing first on I/O. So no overrides and Hydra as part of the initial deliverable.
For the V3, just take your time and release it way later but also way better, so that it feels like a true leap! Not in time but totally unfinished like Autodesk.. If the long awaited v3 feels like just a 2.94, that will be disappointing and not good for Blender image.
You need to get the following DONE:
Interface with tabs for editors, not only for top layout presets.
USD full integration
Node for particles
Cycles Render Memory and Speed leap
Various badly named stuff fixed like “join” everywhere instead of the famous “merge”
Severe memory and perf modeling improvements
If these AT least are not part of v3, what a disappointment it will be.
Blender 3 is a series, starting with the 3.0 release and ending with the 3.3 LTS. The complete feature set of Blender 3 won’t be a showstopper to get 3.0 out in the open.
That said 3.0 will probably have a longer bcon1 phase to allow the major projects to have their initial implementation done in time.
For what I can know Blender 3.x will stop with 3.7 LTS version, if released plan are not changed
I think that fast gpu armature skinning needs to be placed on the table.
I also think that geometry nodes project should be writing compute or vertex shaders, or a separate branch of the nodes should be developed to that end.
We need better rigging & animation workflows with good design for advance layared facial rigs on top of that GPU based deformation for faster playback…this way we can dethrone Maya and make some room for Blender in blockbuster productions.
The timetable is very promising! A simplified UI for newbies in 3.0 would also be welcome. A blender reduced to the essentials, to understand, suitable for kids who are starting to do 3D for the first time. Regardless, good luck for the rest of the planning.
I agree the a simplified UI would be great for beginners, so that’s why I made a request for a customizable user interface. People could choose between UIs specialized for beginners, for maximum functionality with all the buttons out, and for users to hide buttons they never use (like the seemingly useless mode slider that pops up when you duplicate an object). The great thing about a customizable UI is that it doesn’t remove any functionality from Blender (I guarantee you someone out there loves the features you hate), it just allows users to hide what they don’t like.
https://blender.community/c/rightclickselect/rzgbbc/
I want the “make nice animation” button.
Been waiting for it for since version 0.9
About Blender 3 :
** I have this idea that only blender 3 could host, because it’s something completely different and interesting, and I don’t mind someone else achieve before me, I just hope to see it :
-first of all.. it will be based on everything nodes system, but one step further, one step toward a real development and more simpler, intuitive, easy to do, easy to learn, easy to modify approach .
– after analyzing and seeing the big picture, there is still one way that will solve all problems, let’s get into it:
– did u ever imagined you could create every thing with just words?! .. that’s now possible with a few modifications.. instead of using just words it will be words and symbols, these symbols will hold curves and dots and complete sentences… and will have different types of course and a symbol manager.. that we can insert it towards our textbox holding the reserved words …
– if u get interested to know more .. contact me on FB …
What are you on about? I have a feeling you wrote this in your native language and then used Google Translate which did a terrible job at translating lol
Sounds like proper english to me, although I’d say they’re being just a tad idealistic
You should totally look into learning some Python.
Hi Dalai,
Thank you for the good news.
Anyway, is there any plan for Compositor and VSE Projects? Or is it included in the teaser of “Real time viewport video compositor”?
Regards.
Hi Aditia,
There is one full-time VSE developer working for a few months already in the VSE, and a new developer working part-time in the compositor (started mid-March). So there is definitively activity in theses areas.
Could the compositor now be similar to Nuke that is used by EVERYONE ?
That means a “Merge” node with multiple blend modes in it !
Vertical composting available NOBODY comp horizontally almost !
Combine very similar nodes into a few with extra behavior option instead of making 5 million of different simple nodes !
Good news but unfortunately again without improving Texture Paint Mode.
rethink the array modifier in terms of (one) geometry node
Good to see some reasonable planning. I wish you will have even more talented professionals onboard to help with increasing needs in development! From my perspective, in my pipeline most important are those subjects:
1. Mesh editing optimization
– in raw scenes calculated from point data 3d city scans I usually have more than dozens of millions of vertices. Editing such scene, even if it has just few millions verts, is a HUGE PAIN. Nothing works – edit mode, modifiers are so laggy than I have to wait even 5-20s for refresh, which makes work nearly impossible or at least exceptionally slow. Sculpt mode works in acceptable speed, but for this kind of geometry it usually is not applicable. All of that on a damn fast machine with 32-core cpu @3.9 GHz and RTX 3070, RTX Titan 24GB or quadro onboard. So the optimization is VERY NEEDED!
2. Real time viewport video compositor
This is obvious, even simple transitions lag and working with 4k raw image is a pain. This part seems like it is brought from nineteens! :) We are also lacking of a good method of automatic stabilization, mask helpers with automatic edge detecting, etc. Lot’s of improvement are needed here.
yes this is a pain*
Very excited for the animation improvements! Hope it will be easier to transfer animation to game engines like Unreal.
The roadmap looks great. It would be even greater to see two more surprises:
1. Light Linking.
2. Hair Particle nodes
Why do you guys keep adding more projects when there are other ones from 2020, they haven’t seen light yet & as important as these ones?
you keep adding more promises and never deliver them which keeps adding fraustration & disappointment to us, or keeping the hype of new features is more important now!.
https://code.blender.org/2020/01/2020-blender-big-projects/
Ahah. You understand the issue with this software too well.
Plenty of flashy promises, but nothing made well from a pro POV.
Story keeps being the same over and over…
Totally agree.
Pretty much. I still have dreams of “Animation 2020” once in a while then wake up in Zack Snyder’s JS post apocalyptic future realizing it was just a dream of the past.
Hi HedJoG,
The “Animation character pipeline” mentioned in this article (+ library overrides and other related development) is basically what the Animation 2020 is about. It was postponed due to the reasons mentioned in the post. But it is still in the agenda
Hi Eric,
The “2020 Blender big projects” were core projects for the core team to focus on. This approached worked with mixed results. Since then the focus has been on smaller projects with teams. This should also allow for more of those long-standing projects to be wrapped up.
Besides, the projects you see here include projects that are in the agenda thanks to the contribution of other parts (e.g., USD and Grease Pencil).
Outstanding work! keep it up guys!!
Performance, Performance & Performance.
1. performance in animated subdivision surfaces, and
2. performance in mesh editing
Without a doubt the biggest thing holding back adoption at the studios I work at.
Agreed – Undo in a scene of any real complexity should not take 5 seconds to perform.
100%! It shouldn’t be so daunting to have to undo even once. A huge drawback with using Blender heavily.
General performance improvements for large scenes/meshes is on top on my wishlist for improvements in Blender as well.
Yes when i see blender is leggy on common tasks i’ll be disappointed .
I’ve been piddling around on Blender for the last two years. At this point, I consider myself an intermediate level user. While at the newbie level, performance wasn’t much of an issue. At an intermediate level, working in denser meshes….. I feel like ripping my hair out.
Nice! Good to see Vulkan coming.
Oh my god, yes. Seconding the need for better texture painting tools. Support for layers would be a godsend!
I can see that the general approach for projects this year is to form an actual production pipeline, which is great. Hope to see some smaller projects seeing the light of day as well, especially in baking and texture painting areas, which are a bit neglected at the moment
I would love to see some more development on project management support, to accommodate smaller studios as well. Things like proper project folder setup, instead of the ‘ragtag’ folders in the preferences that just point all over the place by default. And are global settings!
And a slightly more sophisticated form of startup management, instead of shortcuts with a ton of variables that are hard to read and control.
A bit more in the line of the other 3d applications, as it would help so much keeping project data under control.
The big studios can just integrate Blender into something like F-Track, but that is not always an option for smaller companies with just a handful of people, or a dedicated programmer in-house.
Hey Rob, don’t know if this is the right place for it. My team is currently working on a pipeline application which takes care of version control, asset- and task management. We are aiming for smaller studios which don’t have the capacity to build such a tool on their own. It will support Blender previews and is still in development. So a good time to bounce ideas back and forward. You can take a look at http://www.anchorpoint.app
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