 Hello community, it's Pablo Asquez with another update of what happened last week in the Blender World. Blender Conference LA, the first edition ever, got postponed. We're gonna see each other next year, 2021. We all know why. It's just not a good idea to gather our people nowadays. Blender 2.83 reached Bitcoin 2. What does it mean? It's the five stages of a Blender release. The first one is to get everything in, just dumping all the big features. The second stage, which is the one we are now, it's mainly about polishing those changes, those big changes. So it might have new features, but they're related to those bigger changes. Bitcoin 3, though, is the one where it's just only back fixes. Bitcoin 4 is even more of a freeze point where you can only critical back fixes. And Bitcoin 5 is when the release happens. It's like a two or three day where Blender is frozen for documentation, for the website updates, and for the actual building, the actual releases that are gonna be the final thing that people download from the websites. Why is this relevant? Well, because if it doesn't make it to Blender source for Bitcoin 2, so last week, it will be postponed to Blender 2.84. Nope, Blender 2.9. Remember, that is the next release that it's planned to happen around August. If everything is okay, there's still a planet by then. Of course, positive. Volume Object is a new object type that you're gonna find when you do shift A to add a new object. You're gonna find volume. You can use a VVV and open VVV object or make an empty one. So you can add your own open VVV data to it. You can recognize it by its cute little cloud icon. And in the properties editor, you're gonna find all the settings for this object type. This new object type is supported by all engines within Blender, the Workbench Engine, EV and Cycles. Virtual Reality VR has landed in Blender. This is the first milestone. It's the initial support. It's bringing the library. It's OpenXR. So it's compatible with all the devices that are supporting those open source drivers. The first milestone is to do scene inspection. So you can look around, even walk around with positional tracking if your headset supports it. So you can actually, now that we're all locked up in our rooms, you can make a new one and just look with your headset. Using it is fairly straightforward. You just need to enable the built-in add-on. It's not enabled by default because it's exposing it right now. It's a bit experimental, but it comes built in Blender. So you just need to enable it. And in the 3D view sidebar, you're gonna find the VR tab. Video Sequence Editor got disk cache. So if you remember in the previous Blender version, there were some improvements on the cache. Well, some improvement got completely rewritten. The cache system in Blender, the video sequence editor, you can now see live when it's actually caching and it can cache multiple levels. So much better. Now, this got improved because this system now allows you to save that cache into your hard drive, into your disk for faster playback or more consistent playback, especially for those strips that are not really possible to see in real time when you have many layers of things stacked up. This feature has its own section in the user preferences where you can enable it, have a limit per how many gigs you want to use in your hard drive, and also like directory where you want to store this cache. This is pretty exciting because this first implementation for this caching can be used in the future for maybe thumbnails for your strips or replacement for the proxy system in Blender. It can have so many options basically. It's very very flexible. So pretty exciting for the future of this feature. Future, future, future. The user interface side of the sequence editor also got improvements. The strips are now they look a bit more modern. They have a there is easier to recognize which strip you're working on, which one is active, which state they're in the handles are much smaller, but the action zone is the same. So it's just the same as before. It just looks a bit smaller. So it doesn't get over with the rest of the overlays. It has so many but like the waveforms are also drawn better. And now they react to the volume of that waveform that audio strip has so many improvements you can check on the on the commit logs just to see what changed. A bunch of fixes were done in the user interface as well. For example, in thinning, you can now change the color of the view aligned gizmo. For example, when you're rotating the view that white ring, it was hard coded to be white. So if you had a white or bright background, you wouldn't see it. Now you can change the color. You can now also change the color and size of the checkerboard pattern that the little squares that you see when something is transparent, like in the image editor, the sequencer. Now you can change which are the colors and how big they are. And lastly, a fix. Actually, this is a setting that wasn't exposed. Now you can change the grid color of the movie clip editor. Under the blender menu, there is a system section with things that were accessible before they were not exposed any in any way. For example, you can reload the scripts from there and get some stats on memory. You can open the debug menu, which is used a lot by developers to try hidden features or very experimental ones and some more, but this is more for a blender add on developers. And this one is pretty exciting. It is experimental, but it's the initial implementation of a new search menu within blender is a completely different approach. So far, the biggest advantage to this new menu is that it shows not only the operator name and shortcut, like the previous one, it shows the menu where you can find it. So if you search for like monkey, it's going to show add for shift A mesh monkey with the monkey icon. The future of the idea is that you should also be able to right click add to quick favorites or right click change shortcut for example. And in our papery section, wrist pencil in the opacity modifier, there is a new hardness option that will override the hardness in the whole stroke, not only in a per point base and a fix but a very nice one is the faith option for fading objects. Now we'll take the viewport color into account and not just fade to black always. It makes the objects hard to see otherwise. And in the rick inside of things in weight paint mode, there's a new look relative option. Okay, this one I get it really sorry. This checkbox alters how weights are displayed and painted weights are presented as if all look vertex groups were deleted and the remaining the form groups normalized. This mode also allows temporarily viewing non normalized weights as if they were normalized without actually changing the values. Okay, that's that's that that one I understand but I need to get more familiar with rigging. Rigging is just like a completely different world and that is all for this recap. There has been all their back fixes improvements like fluid simulation. Now when you cancel, it's going to cancel right away instead of waiting for that one frame to finish before cancelling. So it feels a bit more snappy and so many other fixes that are impossible to name them all. Remember we are doing live streams where we get to interview developers, artists and talk about the workflow we already did one for sculpting for grease pencil for physics with the developer of a mantaflow that was super fun and it's just going to be amazing. So stay tuned for more content on the blender foundation youtube channel and I'll talk to you in the next video. Bye bye. Wash your hands and stay home.