One month since v2 was launched: what is new and what's next?
It's been slightly over a month since Freebird's v2 was launched, so let's recap what's happened since then, and look at what's coming up next!
Community
Our Discord community has grown to over 600 members, and it is very active at trying out new Early-Access features and providing very valuable feedback! This is crucial to Freebird's ability to build what really matters to users.
There's also been more buzz about Freebird on social media, resulting in some cool experimentation by users!
Some user experiments using Freebird:
- https://twitter.com/MartinNebelong/status/1757074680811261988
- https://twitter.com/yonkonline/status/1770474600989663391
- https://twitter.com/ryo_timo/status/1757380208913752518
- https://www.instagram.com/p/C3SW2rEMRRE/
Did I miss any? Please send me your cool "made with Freebird" videos!
New features
Here are some of the new features built after v2's launch:
- Movable pose bones
- Free rotation on any axis, while navigating
- Loop Cut
- Merge vertices
- Grab and move lights/camera
- Live Camera Preview
- Draw Annotations
- Automatic keyframing, for animation
A more detailed list of changes can be found in the changelog.
While some of these features were planned beforehand, most of these were built in response to user feedback. So if you'd really like something built (that helps you today), please let me know!
Upcoming features
While nothing is ever promised (especially since priorities can change based on user feedback), here are some of the important new features coming very soon:
- Simple animation timeline and controls in VR
- Transform gizmo, for precise control
- Knife tool
- Pick material and color
- Improved extrude tool
- Plugin API, to allow users to extend Freebird's VR functionality with custom Python scripts
- UI for managing annotation layers in VR
- And lots of UI tweaks and adjustments, including potentially moving the
grab
functionality to thetrigger
button (instead ofsqueeze
)
So yeah, lots more to come. The focus, as always, remains on making VR a part of the daily design workflow. So will continue figuring out what's preventing people from using it regularly, and bridging that gap.
Thanks!