Testing - DIGITAL PRODUCTION

Blender’s Vulkan Venture: Community Call to Arms

Bela Beier — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 12:58:30 +0000

Blender is taking a bold leap forward by integrating the modern Vulkan graphics API as the successor to its classic OpenGL backend. With the experimental phase first appearing in Blender 4.3 and further developments in Blender 4.4, the initiative is laser-focused on achieving production readiness for this transformative technology. While initial efforts concentrated on matching feature parity rather than performance gains, the project is now rapidly evolving, and the Blender team needs enthusiastic testers to provide invaluable feedback.

From Experimental Beginnings to a Feature-Filled Future

The Vulkan backend was introduced experimentally to render both Blender’s user interface and the real-time EEVEE engine. Key iterations have been released via Blender 4.3 and Blender 4.4, providing a glimpse into the future of rendering capabilities. Despite the technical improvements, the backend remains in an experimental state, making it vital for users to evaluate stability, functionality, and platform-specific performance. Detailed testing feedback is essential in streamlining issues and enhancing the tool’s usability, simplicity, and stability—qualities every production artist values. Testing this build gives you the chance to become one of the proactive individuals actively shaping Blender and the wider VFX community. For more details, visit the original article on 80.lv.

Supported and Unsupported Platforms

This table shows the platforms that would work. Platforms that are unsupported don’t have Vulkan 1.2 support or have issues in the drivers that require a lot of work to work around.

Devices	Windows	Linux
NVIDIA
GTX 700 – GTX 800	NVIDIA 500+	Unsupported
GTX 900 – GTX 1000	NVIDIA 500+	NVIDIA 550+
RTX 2000 – RTX 5000	NVIDIA 500+	NVIDIA 550+
AMD
HD 7000 – HD 8000	Unsupported	Mesa
R 200, R 300	Unsupported	Mesa
RX 400 – RX 600	AMD Official/latest	AMD Official/latest, Mesa
RX Vega	AMD Official/latest	AMD Official/latest, Mesa
RX 5000 – RX 9000	AMD Official/latest	AMD Official/latest, Mesa
Intel
Intel 6-10th gen iGPU	Unsupported	Mesa
Intel 11th gen iGPU and above	Intel Official/latest	Mesa
Intel Arc	Intel Official/latest	Mesa
Qualcomm
Adreno X1-85 GPU	Qualcomm Official	Not tested

This table illustrates that the current testing builds are primarily aimed at Windows and Linux users. macOS and any other platforms are not supported at this time, so testers on those systems should proceed with caution.

How to Get Involved and Make a Difference

The testing phase is not just a technical exercise—it’s a call to arms for every professional who wants to leave a mark on the future of digital production. By enabling the Vulkan backend in the Blender 4.5 alpha builds and reporting issues related to stability, feature functionality, and platform-specific behavior, you are directly contributing to a project that could redefine our creative workflows. Participating in this initiative means becoming one of the people actively making Blender and the VFX world better, ensuring that future releases offer robust and reliable performance for demanding production environments.

Looking Ahead

With plans to achieve production readiness within the year, this initiative underscores Blender’s commitment to staying at the technological forefront of the 3D creation landscape. The focus remains firmly on empowering professionals with advanced features while maintaining the ease-of-use and stability that are crucial in high-pressure production settings. As you embark on testing this experimental backend, remember that this innovation should always be carefully verified before incorporating it into critical production workflows. For the latest updates and downloads, please refer to the Blender development portal.

With experimental features, a dash of humor, and a community-driven spirit, Blender’s move to Vulkan is a collaborative journey—one where every test report helps pave the way towards a smoother, more efficient future in digital content creation. Happy testing, and may your renders be ever flawless!

Join the Effort here: Devblog Blender

The post Blender’s Vulkan Venture: Community Call to Arms first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

New in the toolbox

Bela Beier — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 11:31:00 +0000

Kards

Good test cards are often overlooked. Maybe you have a background image, maybe a few slides in PowerPoint. Kards is better. Alteka Solutions has developed the testing tool for professionals – cross-platform, free and virtually foolproof. Kards creates a series of useful cards with motion and audio synchronisation tests. You can name and label the cards – and in version 1.2, Kards is available – free of charge – for Windows and Mac, and even in versions for Intel chips and M1 in the Apple system). Select the output screen and click on “Activate”. Very simple.

Select output and click together,
what you want – bars in different styles, from HDR to SMPTE to simple colour field or ARIB.

Grids are flexibly customisable – if you’re not sure what you need a grid for: projectors, virtual production and anything where you need to be sure it’s straight and on the right system. We’ve all sat in presentations where you get seasick.

Audiosync is also flexibly customisable – you can see which FPS is running on which screen with a click and frame counter. And we know of at least two sets where this was very helpful – and yes, we also think variable frame rates are great.

Having lots of audio outputs is great, but some screen always steals the signal – that’s why Kards can also output an additional signal and you can see what outputs are really active – or not. If you want, you can use AI generator voices, defined tones, pink/white noise, stereo signals or even your own audio files. It would be foolish to set up the whole team as a DJ. But be careful: you can add up the sounds – clicking on all of them will give you a headache.

And if you want to test LEDs, you can even limit what happens in rows and columns – these are freely configurable in size (panel width/height) and position – or, like all other maps, can be set in motion.

You can change the map to be created at any time and configure the options for this map. If you give the computer/screen a name, you can easily recognise which output is which. If required, you can save the output map as a PNG file or set it up as a background image with a single click. This allows you to prepare the various output stations as you need them.
The – as already mentioned – free software is easy to use, and if you want to start your configured map in the system, simply click on “Enable” at the bottom left and the screen will be taken over – a window mode is of course also available. So to summarise: What more could you want?
alteka.solutions/kards

Movieprint

Currently available in version 0.2.22 for Windows and Mac, Movieprint is one of the more specialised tools – namely the task of creating a contact sheet from a video file. Now everyone is saying: You can do that with software XYZ, and with Edit Tools anyway – that’s true, but with Movieprint it’s also possible if you don’t have the big tools installed – or if you don’t know where, it’s just easier. And it really is almost foolproof easy to define custom grids, file and image specific data, margins etc. to create a custom look for MoviePrints. Depending on what you need it for.

In/out points can of course also be customised – depending on which shot, scene or area you want to create a contact sheet from. If you want, you can of course also scroll through the film and select the frames you want as thumbnails. So you run the “automatic” function and then select – frame by frame – which thumbnail you want. If everything fits, you can save it in a template and – for example – semi-automatically attach contact sheets to archived projects – depending on how important the project is or how much time you want to save when retrieving it. If you only need something “quickly”, you can also switch to Shot Detection or a timeline view and generate contact sheets semi-automatically – and thus collect a series of films in a contact sheet, for example.

All in all a special tool, but – like so many things – very useful from time to time, and since the exported example below – from finding the video file to exporting the printout – took less than 30 seconds, obviously also very easy to use. The example image is the “lead image” of the last link in this collection. www.movieprint.org

iColorist Practice Media

The question of “where to get footage” is as old as the hills in VFX studios… A first selection of free, “free” footage in relevant quality (everyone has tried to download from YouTube) can be found at iColorist’s list, with links to download locations for footage from Arri, BMD, RED and more – in various versions.
icolorist.com/practice-media-footage-list

Shotonwhat?

In principle, it’s all there somewhere – but putting it together is helpful. If you occasionally want to know which cameras and lenses are used to shoot the various cinema hits, you should bookmark “Shot On What” – a huge database that brings together the technology used, systems, people involved and more for the respective films – including crew and team, as well as dedicated categories for cameras, lenses, digital, film, stereoscopy, audio, VFX & animation, colour, services, pre-production/production/post-production, distribution and more
Post Production, Distribution and more. Definitely worth a visit and a bookmark!

shotonwhat.com

PicClick

Okay, we’re slowly moving away from the VFX context – but we recommended it at FMX, so here it is: Pic Click is an alternative, fast interface for Ebay – so if you search the used platform often, you’ll find a better overview here – including a gallery of all offers, a link to the suspected product on Amazon, and so on. You can also connect to your Ebay account, EASILY search in different country versions, and that’s it – anyone who is often on the second-hand platform knows how miserable the internal search is!
picclick.de

Cat and Moth

Some stories stick in the memory – and as we reported on “Cat and Moth” at the beginning of 2022, everyone wanted to see the film. And now guess what it’s about? Bingo! After a successful festival tour and a host of well-deserved awards, Cat & Moth is finally available to watch in full online. Watch the film here: is.gd/cat_and_moth

The post New in the toolbox first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.