The Blender Foundation has announced the results of this year’s Google Summer of Code. This year 7 projects were completed including Outliner improvements, the improvement of Cycles and EEVEE for Procedural Content Creation, Core support of VR headsets through OpenXR, Bevel Custom Profiles, Intel Embree BVH for GPU, Cloth Simulator improvements, and continued Development on the LANPR Engine. Read more about these on the Blender Developer blog.
Blender’s Google Summer of code projects
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I am usually cheerful regarding blender development, however I am frustrated that they fail to focus on important and quick to solve issues which would enable it to serve as serious and complete alternative to the existing stagnation/extortion-ware on market. Mainly still no OpenVDB after so many years! Forget about decent smoke, fire, RBD simulations (destruction), clouds, whitewater etc. Next time you need whitewater just use particles and ridiculously instance semi transparent spheres there causing your scene to grind to a halt. Need smoke imported? export 2GB alembic pointcloud files per FRAME and hope that point_density node reads them in resolution they were exported… but it does not, it’s absolutely broken for anim and render farm use, inefficient, slow and low quality.
Frustratingly it is integrated already, so it would not cause code bloat. It writes some custom meta_data which other applications discard (like houdini), however even when attempting to emulate it and write it back, blender just CRASHES on reading any imported openvdb but its own. Even opening these .vdb files independently with pyopenvdb will result in unknown metadata, so cannot write meta_data back with some external command line process. To me it would seem like a day at most for developer to create exception handling while importing external openvdb. Of course proper UI would be nice too, but it will not materialize as internal consensus will not be reached as on so many other aspects. Until then pretty much ANY slightly serious VFX, VIDEO production is blocked.
So here we are, still THE ONLY major 3D application with this feature absent. OPEN SOURCE but failing to embrace OPEN standards. Next time you see some great movie being done with blender, know it’s a custom build from old version that had UDIM, OpenVDB, perhaps even a method to import simulated alembic hair and not crash the viewport. Stuff that matters in production. I apologize for rant, but there’s been too much focus on all the glitter lately that has minimal to no impact what so ever compared to such critical features that prevent one project execution after another.