Blender 2.81 To Feature Intel Open Image Denoise & Eevee Renderer Improvements

Blender 2.80 made its hugely anticipated debut just under one month ago while already Blender 2.81 is looking interesting and will hopefully be out in November.

Some of the early work for Blender 2.81 that's now outlined on the in-progress 2.81 release page includes:

- Intel Open Image Denoise support was added for denoising renders. Intel's been recently talking up the Open Image Denoise capabilities and nice to see it getting adoption in the Blender space as a new option. Those wanting to learn more about this denoising library geared for ray-tracing can do so via their GitHub site.

- Eevee as the new real-time render engine option of Blender 2.80 is being further enhanced with new features.

Open Image Denoise and Eevee improvements are what is most promising at the moment but some other work also includes:

- OpenVDB Voxel Remesh support to create a new quad mesh based on the volume of a mesh.

- Brush curve presets.

- WebM support.

- Support for writing alpha values in WebM and VP9.

More details via the in-progress release notes. It will be exciting to see what else lands in this open-source, cross-platform 3D modeling software ahead of the November update.