At the beginning of the year we published the “Projects to Look Forward to in 2023“. It is time for an update on the planning, and to share the prioritized projects as of now – second quarter of 2023.
This concerns mainly the work to be done by the developers working at the Blender headquarters or on a development grant.
In bold are the targets currently in active development or recently implemented.
- Light Linking
- Custom Normals
- Grease Pencil Integration
- Simulation Nodes
- Node Operators
- Realtime Mode
- Node Tools R&D
- Compute Pipeline and Resources
- Graphic Pipeline
- Feature Complete
- Optimizations
In the spirit of transparency in Blender development, below you can find the weekly planning for these projects.
Keep in mind that this schedule is ever evolving, and the target deadlines are bound to be shifted.
The bf-admins column in the spreadsheet corresponds to the person responsible for reviewing and follow-up on that project.
Updates
The Brush Assets project is delayed and encountering unforeseen technical difficulties. Thus it will be broken down in two main deliverables:
- Asset Shelf – for Pose Library.
- Draft System – for Brushes.
Cycles and Compositor projects are being developed to be tested and used in the next Blender Studio open movie (to be announced). Procedural Texturing may be part of the open movie development goals after those projects are completed.
Dynamic Overrides may also get in the picture once “Brush Assets” is finished.
Get Involved
If you’re interested in joining the development of those projects, visit the #blender-coders channel or attend the related module meetings to learn how to get involved.
Support the Future of Blender
Donate to Blender by joining the Development Fund to support the Blender Foundation’s work on core development, maintenance, and new releases.
I would use blender if I could group the geometry in folders and use the folders to move the content all together but it seems blender doesn’t have this basic feature.
Until then it’s a no go.
Thank you for all until now, Blender.
Are you gonna add the ability to use any graphics card in cycles? I have a Intel iris xe that apparently isn’t compatible. ):
Actually, I have another interesting question. Will Blender develop any AI functions? I think it must be a forward-looking plan in the entire industry.
as i said in another comment:
that is a bizarre legal area that requires hours of set-up and scraping tens of thousands of peoples’ copyrighted labour to feed it into a giant machine that requires countless megawatt hours of electricity, or paying some dubiously moral investor-magnet company that’s done it already to use the monolithic end result of their database.
neither of these solutions seems like a good investment of time or money for an OPEN SOURCE program.
Oh, no, there is a little misunderstanding, the AI functions I pointed out above can be entering a keyword then get a standard model. For example, when I need a TV model, I can key in “a television”, then I get a standard TV model in a minute, which really speeds up my modelling procedure. So, following this idea, I can get different models quickly and standardly to accelerate the next work like modification, perfecting models or any other further work.
Anyway, this pattern can interpenetrate every step of creation, for another example, the shade step. If I need a crystal effect, I can simply key in “crystal effect”, the system will instantly set up a standard note links for my model, so I can make a further adjustment. And this is actually what I really mean, the AI function.
And how is the AI going to know what a television is and how it can be represented in 3D or a what a crystal effect is and how to represent it in shader node/code. To understand this read wannacry’s reply again or ask ChatGPT or something.
Actually, did you know there is a blender addon for chatgpt functionality? It uses it to make code to do some otherwise really annoying stuff, look it up on YouTube
With each release I see less and less concern about the modeling tool being developed or improved, as if someone decided that they are already good enough and have reached the level available in other 3d applications, which is completely untrue. The amount of imperfections, bugs or bad design in them is downright appalling.
Proportional editing works unintuitively
Knife tool ignores snapping to the increment.
And these are just the things I missed today.
Agreed :|
Yeah i agree. Modeling needs some improvements.
+1 Totally agree! Just check right click select!
I absolutely agree with you, my friend, there are so many errors and deficiencies in blender that I don’t understand why they haven’t been solved in 20 years. I don’t understand why the developers don’t fix this. I swear I just filed a new bug report.
Hi! Love all the stuff . One question:
Are there plans to implement efficient use of mipmapping files?
Whatever happened to baking and texturing?
Ah, never mind. It’s there. All is well. :D
Awesome! Blender continues to become incredible!
Great! Any updates regarding the layered texture painting system? I believe it was mentioned last year.
Thanks!
This is mentioned in the Update section as the Procedural Texturing project.
Is there a live version of the spreadsheet we can follow somewhere?
There is no live-version of it. But if things go according to plan I will share an updated version next quarter or it next feels relevant to do so.
However you can follow the individual projects progress by visiting their links and subscribing to their tasks.
Thank you for the blog post, and for bringing back the roadmap! Really looking forward to multires.
Please improve the rendering management system! Create a frame buffer that allows you to manage your renderings and save them automatically, without overwriting them (as happens in vray, corona and any other rendering software). Unfortunately today if after a rendering the PC crashes you lose everything!
Awesome ! However I don’t see the new “Principled BSDF V2” shader. This development has been abandoned?
Thank you for the amazing work !
No, it just resumed development, and will land on blender 4.0
Lukas wants it to land in 3.6, ideally, so that V1 and V2 are both part of the LTS to allow for easier transition between the two.
Everyone using Blender should join the development fund to ensure the future for the software. Seriously, most people can afford 6 bucks a month.
Agree. Everybody wants fast improvement but very few people are joining development fund.
Atleast a small amount needs to be given by everyone.
100% agree
Thank you for the update!
I have a few questions:
– Since it’s under Viewport Compositor section, does that mean Kuwahara filter get viewport compositor support? (Also, in the image, I think “Painterly filters” should be inside Viewport Compositor instead of Cycles.)
– “Procedural Texturing may be part of the open movie development goals after those projects are completed.” Does this mean it might be part of the second next open movie after Pet Projects? Not the next movie after Pet Projects?
– Slightly off-topic, but what happened to dev fund? I see four of the big patrons are suddenly (in a week of time literally) disappeared from the list.
I think there was an option to not put the logo in the list
Hi, I’m glad you liked the update. Replying to the on-topic questions:
> Re: Viewport Compositing
The ultimate goal is to have all nodes supported in both viewport and off-line rendering. That includes the Kuwahara node.
Painterly Filters was originally considered part of “Cycles” because the Cycles team decided to embrace this target and help coordinate the compositor project. But it could indeed be listed as one of the compositing targets.
> Re: Procedural Texturing:
That means part of the movie that will be announced later (this week?) which shall happen after the Pets project.
Great work guys! Blender is truly amazing!
Are there any plans for AI in Blender in the near future?
that is a bizarre legal area that requires hours of set-up and scraping tens of thousands of peoples’ labour to feed it into a giant machine that requires countless megawatt hours of electricity, or paying some dubiously moral investor-magnet company that’s done it already to use the monolithic end result of their database.
neither of these solutions seems like a good investment of time or money for an OPEN SOURCE program.
Hi. Loving all the stuff. Thanks for the hard work to make this software amazing.
Ps.: I think the first “asset shelf” link is broken in the targets table.
Thanks for the heads up! Fixed. It should now point to https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/issues/102879
Tip for the future: If you see a link that starts with `ro.developer.blender.org` simply remove the `ro.` bit and it should redirect to the new URL. But also please let us know so we can fix them.
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