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Project Status

Updates from June 2025

Note: Freebird is free for students! If you're a student at a school or college, please feel free to email or message me for a free copy!

June 2025 marked a restart of the Freebird project, after a few months of maintenance-only fixes.

Reliability

My focus in June was on improving Freebird's reliability. A number of long-standing critical bugs have been fixed, broken features have been repaired, and missing documentation has been updated. Basically, anything that crashed Freebird (or was urgently broken) was considered as an immediate priority.

I'm still investigating a Blender crash (that happens occasionally). So please save your work frequently.

I'm sure Freebird still has undetected bugs, so please let me know on #support if Freebird crashes for you. But a number of those crashes were fixed in June, and a focused effort has been made to improve the reliability.

Features

In terms of features, Free Extrude is back, and the transform gizmos now support moving/rotating/resize along specific planes. The transform gizmos now also support mode-specific transforms, i.e. the ability to move without rotating/resizing, rotate without moving/resizing, or resize without moving/rotating.

Tools to help improve reliability

To help investigate difficult-to-recreate bugs, I added an event record/replay developer tool in Freebird. If Freebird crashes at any point while running (on my PC), I can replay those exact button presses and movements any number of times, and check Freebird's code while running it. I've fixed a few difficult-to-recreate bugs using this tool. Note: This tool is disabled by default for users, so Freebird isn't recording your actions.

Another improvement was to run Freebird's automated tests in a random order, using pytest-random-order. Freebird already runs over 600 automated tests (which check various aspects of Freebird before a new version is released). But those tests used to run in a fixed order previously. Since I can't predict the order in which a user will use Freebird's tools, I'm now running the tests in a random order. This helps ensure that Freebird is reliable regardless of the order in which you use the various tools. This change has already revealed a couple of hidden bugs (that have been fixed).

Community

The Discord community has grown to nearly 1200 members, and it is active at trying out new Early-Access features and providing valuable feedback!

Some user experiments using Freebird:

Did I miss any? Please send me your cool "made with Freebird" videos!

Next

Lots more to come. The focus, as always, remains on making VR a part of your daily design workflow.

Thanks!

Get started with Freebird!

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:

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:

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 the trigger button (instead of squeeze)

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!

Get started with Freebird!