Blender used by AMD to benchmark their new 16-core chip.
http://www.pcworld.com/…/amds-threadripper-struts-onstage-w…
This three-minute teaser for a full-length animated feature is based on Dutch artist Martin Lodewijk's classic comics series Agent 327. The Blender Animation Studio is currently developing the story and seeks for funding to bring this adventurous comedy animation film to an international audience.
More information: https://agent327.com
Entirely made in Blender, released as Creative Commons for Blender Cloud Cloud subscribers....
Join https://blender.cloud today to get 10 years of film production history, tutorials, and help us making more!
Blender 2.8's new viewport engine Eevee just got light reflections, normal maps support and bloom effect!
Subscribe to the official Blender Developers YouTube channel: youtube.com/BlenderDevelopers
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... Stay updated on the code blog:
https://code.blender.org
Get Blender 2.8 development builds:
https://builder.blender.org
Add-on manager, better sculpting, normals editing tools, implicit skinning and much more coming this summer on Google Summer of Code 2017!
https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/organ…/5768612708089856/
New user story by blendFX! Making of Rochlitz VR experience in Blender!
Fresh from the developers room at the Blender Institute!
A great new feature in the upcoming Blender 2.8: the ability to overlay render engines. In this video Dalai Felinto demos Cycles and the 3D viewport combined.
New user story: The Man in the High Castle by Barnstorm VFX
https://www.blender.org/…/visual-effects-for-the-man-in-th…/
Blender updated their cover photo.
Creative freedom starts here.
Image by Gleb Alexandrov & Aidy Burrows
CGSociety interviews Pokedstudio's Jonathan Ball, a brilliant artist from the UK using mainly Blender on his workflow.
http://www.cgsociety.org/…/a-look-inside-the-colorful-world…
His splash screen for Blender 2.77 is available for download at:
https://www.blender.org/download/demo-files/
More of his work at www.pokedstudio.com
Blender Cycles: OpenCL is now on par with CUDA
That's really good news especially for AMD cards! This will be part of Blender 2.79.
Full report: https://wiki.blender.org/index.p…/Dev:Source/…/Cycles/OpenCL
The development of the upcoming Blender 2.8 gets support from several amazing companies!
Read about this here:
https://www.blender.org/press/industry-support-for-blender/
The latest update to Blender 2.78 is out!
Get Blender 2.78c now to boost your Cycles rendering performance on the most rock-solid stable Blender yet.
Download from blender.org/download (or update on Steam)
...Here is the massive update list:
Cycles
* Multithreaded shader compilation and optimizations for emission meshes
* More efficient noise reduction for Branched Path Tracing
* Unused shader nodes are now ignored on render time
* Improvements to procedural textures
* Fireflies reduction for background textures when using MIS
* Different seed for subframes and different stereo views, allowing "slow-motion" effect and improved VR experience
* Distance culling for objects to remove objects which are too far away from the camera
* Better remaining time estimation
* Various optimizations and fixes for deformation motion blur
* Added time steps BVH option to speed up rendering of scenes with motion blur
* Hair particle settings were moved to Geometry panel of Render context
* Beckmann/GGX distribution with 0 roughness is now considered a singular ray
Cycles: GPU
* Use XDG folder for cache on Linux and OSX, which avoids having per-Blender version folder with all the OpenCL/CUDA kernels built.
* Ability to enable/disable individual GPUs as opposite to old behaviour with pre-defined combinations only. Not only this helps to some artists, but also makes it possible to have flexible benchmark scripting.
Cycles: CPU
* Use more global SSE optimizations for SSE4.1+ kernels.
* Multiple improvements for the latest AVX2 CPUS:
* Optimized various math utilities (cross-products, dot-products, min-axis-selection and others).
* Faster version of triangle intersection function.
* Optimization of various steps in BVH traversal algorithm (including both construction and traversal).
Cycles: OpenCL
* Added 3D textures support for OpenCL
* Major render time improvements on transparent shadows
Dependency graph
* Optimization of dependency graph construction time
* Fix missing or wrong relation links, which were causing hard-to-reproduce bone flickering in complex rigs
* Fix various crashes related on linked data blocks
* Fixes for missing animation updates
Other
* Fixed regression crash when adding texture node to compositor
* Fixed crash of inverse kinematics on 32 bit Windows platforms
* Improve multi-threaded usage of fluid simulation
* Return correct alpha for environment map in GLSL
Check out how the massive motion blur render time improvement were made possible in the latest film project at the Blender Institute: https://cloud.blender.org/…/cycles-turbocharged-how-we-made…
For more detailed release docs, check out the wiki
https://wiki.blender.org/…/Release_…/2.78/Performance_update
The Cycles Encyclopedia is now available in Français!
(plus German and English)
— Products shown: Cycles Encyclopedia.
Blender updated their cover photo.
Introducing: The Art of Blender Open Movies!
https://store.blender.org/p…/the-art-of-blender-open-movies/
Order before December 27 and get a massive discount!
