Blender 4.4 brings improved animation workflow, better modeling, new sculpt brush, and smoother video editing, plus over 700 issues fixed.

It introduces Action Slots, revolutionizing animation workflows by letting multiple data-blocks share a single Action. The Video Sequencer continues to improve with quality-of-life upgrades for text editing, expanded support for codecs including H.265 and 10/12-bit videos, and performance improvements that make editing faster than ever.

And much more..

In computer graphics, we rarely encounter continuous data. We often work with digital data, and in the context of geometric modeling, this means we typically work with polygon meshes rather than procedural surfaces like Bézier patches. The most popular technique for constructing digital three-dimensional objects in dedicated modeling software is polygon modeling. The result of the creation phase is a set of polygons (mesh), where the polygons in the mesh can share vertices and edges with other polygons.

Although users can create various types of surfaces (e.g., non-manifold), the most common surface is the topological 2-manifold. In short, a 2-manifold is a mathematical concept in topology, where the space locally resembles the Euclidean plane in R². Essentially, every point on a 2-manifold has a neighborhood that looks like a piece of the plane.

At the vertices of a polygon, users can store additional data (per-vertex attributes), such as vertex normals (for simulating curved surf

An educational implementation of a parallel processor in system-verilog.

The Intro to GPU Architecture chapter is a short write-up on the theoretical basics needed to understand the GPU implemented in this repository.

The Khronos Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies dedicated to creating advanced interoperability standards, has announced the release of Vulkan 1.4, the latest version of its cross-platform 3D graphics and compute API. Vulkan 1.4 integrates and mandates support for many proven features into its core specification, expanding the functionality that is consistently available to developers, greatly simplifying application development and deployment across multiple platforms.

The Vulkan 1.4 specification consolidates numerous previously optional extensions, features, and increased minimum hardware limits, many of which were defined in the Vulkan Roadmap 2022 and 2024 milestones and associated profiles, including:

• Streaming Transfers: Vulkan 1.4 imposes new implementation requirements to ensure portable, cross-platform applications can stream large quantities of data to a device while simultaneously rendering at full

The glTF Sample Viewer is an essential part of the glTF ecosystem. Developed by the Khronos 3D Formats Working Group, this open-source JavaScript viewer highlights the latest features of glTF, renders glTF files directly in a web browser, and can be easily integrated into other JavaScript projects using glTF.

Working closely with UX3D, a software company specializing in 3D rendering and user interfaces, Khronos has released version 1.1 of the Viewer, offering substantial functionality and usability improvements. In this blog, we’ll explore the new features of the glTF Sample Viewer 1.1 and share insights on how we’ve made it easier to integrate Sample Viewer into web applications.

New:

• Repository restructuring for easier renderer embedding
• Added WebP support
• Enhanced mobile support
• Added KHR_animation_pointer support
• glTF Validator integration

New version 24.3 of the Mesa opensource 3D graphics library and drivers has been released. New features:

• Expose Vulkan 1.3 on v3dv, both rpi4 and rpi5
• VK_EXT_descriptor_buffer on nvk
• VK_EXT_post_depth_coverage on nvk
• VK_KHR_video_maintenance1 on radv
• VK_EXT_legacy_vertex_attributes on nvk
• GL_KHR_shader_subgroup on radeonsi
• VK_KHR_maintenance7 on nvk
• VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering_local_read on nvk
• GL_ARB_timer_query on Panfrost
• GL_EXT_disjoint_timer_query on Panfrost
• VK_KHR_pipeline_binary on RADV
• VK_KHR_compute_shader_derivatives on anv
• VK_NV_compute_shader_derivatives on nvk
• VK_KHR_compute_shader_derivatives on nvk
• VK_KHR_compute_shader_derivatives on radv
• VK_KHR_shader_relaxed_extended_instruction on anv, hasvk, hk, nvk, radv, tu, v3dv, lvp
• GL_OVR_multiview and GL_OVR_multiview2 on zink
• VK_KHR_shader_float_controls2 on radv
• VK_KHR_shader_float_controls2 on nvk
• VK_EXT_device_generated_commands on nvk, radv
• VK_EXT_host_image_copy on nvk/Turi

The Vulkan Working Group at The Khronos Group has delivered a series of video decode and encode extensions since 2022 collectively referred to as "Vulkan Video." These extensions integrate hardware-accelerated stream compression and decompression using widely adopted codecs with the full power of Vulkan, enabling developers to seamlessly combine GPU-powered rendering and compute acceleration with video processing in a single highly efficient runtime.

Today, with the release of Vulkan 1.3.302, Khronos is proud to announce two new encode extensions. First, the highly anticipated Encode AV1 extension enhances Vulkan Video by adding AV1 encode functionality to complement its existing AV1 decode support. This milestone means that Vulkan Video now provides full decode AND encode acceleration for the H.264, H.265 and AV1 codec standards. Additionally, the new Encode Quantization Map extension introduces advanced encoding features for all supported codecs to Vulkan Video develope

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/22682449

Blender Foundation and the online developer community are proud to present Blender 4.3!

Packed with exciting improvements to existing tools (hello EEVEE Light Linking and multi-pass compositing!), performance boosts, and the foundations for the future (looking at you, Grease Pencil v3).

Plus, hundreds of contributions ranging from new features to accessibility enhancements—and as always: loads of fixes.

The following article is a historical look at the era that spawned first raytracers for home computers, a predecessor to Blender among them. Writing it was possible thanks to the fact, that, for the first time, the progam and source code of said predecessor are publicly available.

glTF has evolved beyond its origins as a standalone 3D format. It is now adopted as an ISO international standard and has become central to a rapidly expanding ecosystem of software tools, standards and extensions.

Given the central role of glTF in enabling 3D experiences across diverse platforms, devices and the web, it is crucial that the glTF ecosystem continue to evolve to meet the needs of content creators, engine vendors and application developers, as well as adapt to new use cases such as 3D shopping, education and training, architectural visualization, and many others.

This year, the Khronos 3D Formats Working Group has reached several significant milestones along the roadmap for developing glTF into an interoperable spatial computing format, and has several extension development efforts underway. Many key extensions for spatial consistency, improved material rendering and consistent render fidelity have now reached the Review Draft stage, where they are ready for detailed re

Creating realistic images has been a persistently challenging problem in computer graphics, especially when it comes to rendering scenes with complex lighting. Path tracing achieves photorealistic quality rendering by simulating the way light rays bounce around the scene and interact with different materials, but it also requires significant computation to generate clean images. This is where neural supersampling and denoising come into play. In this blog post, we describe how our neural supersampling and denoising work together to push the boundary for real-time path tracing.