Another year goes by, and another Google Summer of Code is successfully completed. This year 7 projects were finished, with plenty of new features already into the upcoming Blender 2.81.

Blender 2.81

Outliner Improvements

“With an increased focus on the outliner in Blender 2.80, many improvements could be implemented to increase the outliner’s usability.”

Project | Final Report

Status: Fully merged

By Nathan Craddock, mentored by Brecht Van Lommel and Campbell Barton

Improve Cycles/EEVEE for Procedural Content Creation

“The project hopes to refactor and add Cycles/EEVEE nodes to improve the workflow of technical/shading artists.”

Project | Final Report

Status: Merged, pending Voronoi and Vertex Color nodes

By Omar Ahmad, mentored by Brecht Van Lommel and Jacques Lucke

Blender 2.82

Core Support of Virtual Reality Headsets through OpenXR

“Implementation of core features needed for XR (virtual, augmented and mixed reality) headsets via the new OpenXR specification.”

Bevel Custom Profiles

“User-drawn profiles, which is a commonly requested feature that could expand the bevel modifier use cases and speed up the modeling process.“

Project | Final Report

Current status: Pending code review

By Hans Goudey, mentored by Howard Trickey and Rohan Rathi

2.82 or Later

Intel Embree BVH for GPU

“Supporting Intel Embree fast BVH in GPU can speed up considerably Cycles rendering.“

Project | Final Report

Current status: Pending code review

By Quentin Matillat, mentored by Sergey Sharybin and Stefan Werner

Cloth Simulator Improvement

“Adaptive cloth simulation can decrease the computation time per frame, thereby leading to a better quality of simulation in the same amount of time.“

Project | Final Report

Current status: Code still in a branch only (soc-2019-adaptive-cloth), not sent for review.

by Ish Hitesh Bosamiya, mentored by Brecht Van Lommel and Ton Roosendaal

Continued Development on LANPR Engine

“This project is aimed to complete the fast and accurate 3D NPR feature line rendering workflow and make it more production ready.“