2014 is almost over (and already is for some parts of the world), and the BF is already compiling a list of the projects they anticipate have a decent change of coming into master during the next year. This includes the work that Nicholas Bishop will be working on (investigating Ptex support for Blender painting and Cycles rendering), OpenSubDiv (dependent on news from Pixar), the depsgraph refactor (about a guarantee at this point), the new asset browser, ect…
There will also be general work on usability by the UI team, a dedicated focus on modeling tools by Campbell, custom widget creation by Psy-Fi, and work on increasing the performance/convergence rate of the Cycles engine, exciting stuff ahead
All of this is also possible because of user donations via the development fund and the cloud subscriptions.
An amazing list to be sure…will be exciting to finally see these features arrive in Blender! The depsgraph rewrite, viewport enhancements, Alembic and nodify everything are what I most look forward to.
A pity there is no mention of an outliner and layer manger overhaul, as they are the things I miss most when I jump between C4D and Blender. Maybe this will part of the general UI revamp?
the only exciting thing for me is the viewport thingy… everything else that matters to my line of work is probably at the bottom of blender’s todo list (if at all in the list)
but still, i guess that’s a lot to look forward to
Some of those features look amazing. The asset browser will come in handy particularly at work, as my colleagues and I are constantly scrambling for assets and appending them. I’m always looking at different packages and workflows so see what they can offer but I just always end up coming back to Blender. It really does seem to make more progress compared to a lot of the commercial packages in terms of how much keeps getting added.
I do wonder if the UV tools would be improved at any point though. I played with the indie version of 3D coat over Christmas, and the UV tools are just something else. I’ve also tried Headus which is also fantastic, despite its dated look and baffling controls.
PTex support sounds good for dyntopo sculptors. It eliminates the need for retopo and unwrapping. It’s assigned to Nicholas Bishop. I look forward to it.
Likely to happen >= 90%: Dependency Graph, Multiview, OpenSubDiv, Alembic, Blender 101, Mesh Editing Tools, Viewport, Asset Browsing, Blender Asset Manager + Cloud, PTex, Cycles Speedup, Motion Tracking
Likely to happen < 90%: Hair and Particles, Compositor Canvas, Game Engine
Probability unassigned: Everything Nodes
Brainstorming: Custom manipulator, Workflow
Translation into English:
Brainstorming -> some talk in front of the coffee machine, PowerPoint slides for Blender Conference.
Probability unassigned -> probability 0%.
Likely to happen < 90% -> at best some non-trunk work.
Likely to happen >= 90% -> half in trunk (at best) the rest in branches.
Some notes
OpenSubDiv: no mention to sharp-looking edges so, even if in trunk, zero, nada, nil use for hard surface modelers.
Asset manager and Cloud: textbook Not-Invented-Here rehash of SVN/Git. Complete waste of developer time.
Since the priority will be for features required to render falling toons… do the rest of the homework for exercise.
It will be interesting to revisit this post on Jan 1st, 2016.
While it sounds fab and all that hype… what about: colored wireframe, better layers, proper manual (not another dictionary), adaptive samples, more tone mapping, standardized settings, hierarchical outliner (if i make objects children of same parent i expect them to be as a family or so called group)… but yeah i’m just a user overpowered by the static logic of words carved in stone. Even so, happy to be here.