The Blender Foundation have just announced their “Big Projects” list for Blender in 2021. It is hard to argue that 2020 wasn’t a banner year for Blender development, with three major releases as well as the first ever LTS release. Through 2020 we saw improvements to the Blender UI/UX, sculpting tools, modeling, EEVEE, Cycles and so much more. We also saw a record number of massive companies coming on board the Blender development fund. With the release today of the projects list, we get insight into the Blender priorities in 2021, including priorities such as:
- launch of a new open movie called Sprite Fight
- the everything nodes project, where everything in Blender will be able to be driven procedurally using nodes (see Geometry Nodes in action here)
- all new Asset Browsers editor window for better content management
- massive improvements to the VSE or Video Sequence Editor
- EEVEE real-time rendering improvements including Vulkan support, motion blur, depth of field and possibly raytracing
- VR improvements including the ability to use VR controllers and author content in virtual reality
- Cycles rendering improvements especially related to perfromance
- Animation 22 (previously Animation 2020), an effort to improve animation tools in Blender, sponsored by AWS
- improved pipeline and USD support, Pixar’s open interchange format
You can learn more about the Blender’s accomplishments in 2020, as well as the new projects in 2021 in the video below.