Phase one of the Compositor redesign project is almost completed. Phase one has made a lot of people smile, even if the compositor is still not using OpenCL. Phase two will give you OpenCL accelerated compositing in Blender! Biggest challenge at this moment is that funding for phase two is not finished.

Finally the Blender-aid API is released. It is distributed as part of the new Blender-aid release. With the Blender-aid API you can easily integrate Blender-aid with your production pipeline. There are a lot of possibilities:

• Check usage naming conventions.
• Automate huge refactor tasks.
• Report missing links to RSS, E-mail.
• And much more.

Other changes includes a directory move and rename feature.

This year at the Blender conference, we demoed a new concept. Blender OpenCL Compositor. OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is a technical standard to use multiple type of processor units (like the ones that can be found on graphical cards) to perform computational tasks.

The test system on the Blender conference was an I7 920 quad core (+- 280 EUR) with a GT 220 (+- 70 EUR). A mid-range processor with a mid-range graphical card. The test setup contained several heavy nodes like the bokeh blur and the Lens distortion. The whole test on the CPU took 204 seconds. Using the GPU the task only took 22 seconds! watch the video to see it for yourselves or test drive it on your system. This all sounds good, but it comes with some limitations.

A new version of Blender-aid is released. The new version will update the SVN of the production during refactoring. This feature had been brought forward by the durian team. At a certain moment they had several thousands of missing links and files not named as they planned to. During refactoring the SVN state was not updated and the SVN state had to be updated manually.