Celebrating 10 years of the Cycles render engine, and sharing what is next.

About roles and organization in the render modules.

In the last month, we’ve polished the user interface and added the last planned features to Blender 2.80. Now we are freezing the user interface for documentation and Python API for add-ons.

Overview of graphics cards and drivers that will be supported in the final 2.80 release.

The Blender development team keeps growing, both with Blender Foundation developers and external contributors. To scale the project we need to organize ourselves better.

At the Homestretch workshop we mapped out a release schedule, with the final 2.80 release planned for July.

We’ve entered the Beta phase of development for Blender 2.8. That means all the major features are in place, and we start focusing on bug fixes and polishing.

We are currently an estimated 2-3 weeks away from releasing 2.80 Beta, let’s see what’s left and what’s next.

At this point we will not have a feature complete Beta release ready as we had hoped. Here’s the new plan.

This week Lukas Stockner visited the code quest to finish some of the Cycles improvements he’s been working on, particularly UDIM texture support.

To make the collection system more powerful for animation pipelines, we are making a further design change: collections will be data-blocks that can linked and instanced across scenes and files.

The Blender development infrastructure has been updated for the start of the Blender 2.7x release cycle. For a bird”s-eye view […]