Blender 2.8x was a huge step forward from Blender 2.7x in almost every way. Almost. When it comes to mesh editing however there were some serious performance regressions (along with Boolean functionality, which was fixed in Blender 2.91). The Blender developers however were well aware of this and back in May released this developer blog discussing the first steps in Mesh Editing optimization. With the current development version, Blender 3.0.0, those development efforts are bearing fruit. As you can see from the very non-scientific benchmarking in the video below, performance was as much as 6x better and Blender 2.80.
Additionally, as reported on BlenderNation, Blender’s MultiRes sculpting has seen performance improvements as well.
This time around, it’s multires sculpting that is getting the increased performance treatment, courtesy of a patch by veteran Bmesh developer Joseph Eagar!
The performance increase can be especially felt on base meshes having upwards of 10000 faces, with the patch more efficiently calculating normals via a function that operates on a subset of faces rather than the whole mesh each time a stroke is made.
In additional Blender news, Canonical, the maintainers of the Ubuntu Linux Distro are now offering paid support for Blender LTS releases. Details of this partnership from the Blender news site:
Canonical agrees on building and maintaining their own Blender services organization, based on their trusted Ubuntu Advanced platform. Revenues from the services will be partially shared with Blender, then invested in core Blender development and public support for LTS releases. Aside from linking to Canonical’s service on blender.org, there is no obligation from Blender to participate in the service contracts.
Finally, Blender are also hosted an article from Ubisoft describing their usage of Blender for animation, which is an interesting read.