Blender today released a blog post detailing its roadmap for the current year. Among several projects that the Blender development team is planning for the year ahead, perhaps the most notable one is the integration of Vulkan support in Blender's drawing backend so that it can use more modern libraries. It also says that Eevee will become more memory-efficient thanks to this. However, Blender is quick to add that immediate performance improvements from Vulkan integration should not be expected.
For those unaware, Eevee is Blender's physically-based real-time modern renderer that was introduced with version 2.80. When compared to Cycles, Eevee is generally faster, however, the quality does suffer a bit. For now, though, Eevee limited to single GPU setups.
Speaking of Cycles, without going into much detail, Blender says that there have been several improvements to Cycles' render API as a result of the co-work with Facebook. The team also has "a special surprise" planned for April 23 when it's the 10th anniversary of Cycles.
With the help of Nvidia, Universal Scene Description (USD) importer support will also be coming this year. Other areas that have seen improvements are listed below:
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Asset browser and pose library,
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Library overrides,
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Geometry Nodes,
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Grease Pencil,
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Animation character pipeline
When it comes to long-term support, the upcoming Blender 2.93 will receive LTS for the next two years. You can find more information related to Blender's roadmap in the official blog post here.
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