Blender 2.74

Blender is een professioneel, maar toch gratis, programma voor 3D animatie dat in diverse speelfilms gebruikt is. Blender is een zogeheten 3D content creation suite die uitgebreide mogelijkheden biedt voor 3D modeling.

Blender 2.74 is uitgebracht. In deze uitgave worden verschillende verbeteringen doorgevoerd en nieuwe functies geïntroduceerd. Cycles rendering, sculpting/painting, animation, modeling, particles, freestyle npr rendering, game engine en de gebruikersinterface zijn vernieuwd. Verder zijn heel veel kleine aanpassingen en verbeteringen gedaan en honderden fouten opgelost. Je kunt alle details over de wijzigingen hieronder nalezen.

Blender is te downloaden voor Windows Vista, 7, 8 en 8.1, Mac OS X en Linux.

Uitgaveopmerkingen:
Cycles Rendering
Several improvements for BVH like making it watertight, solving several precision issues and reducing noise
Optimizations:
Black world backgrounds are now removed from the shader graph, resulting in great speed improvements
Various (and great!) memory optimizations
Nodes:
New Pointiness attribute for the Geometry node
Control texture space of one object by another
And more!

User Interface
New Viewport Compositing brings Ambient Occlusion and Depth of Field right into the Viewport!
View-depth can now be picked using an Eyedropper
Outliner:
An Orphaned Data-blocks Mode was added for data-block management
Deleting of entire object hierarchies
Drag&Drop objects to groups
The Node Editor can now show text-blocks in frames
Customizable camera safe areas
And more!

Modeling
Support for Custom Normals was added
Transferring data layers between meshes is now possible thanks to a new Mesh Data Transfer operator and modifier
Tools:
UV handling for Edge- and Vertex Slide was improved
Inverse-square blending for proportional-edit-mode
"Fit Camera View" now works for orthographic cameras as well
A "Split Concave Faces" tool to ensure a convex geometry was added
And more!

Particles
Hair dynamics and editing tools were improved massively:
Support for hair collission with meshes
Simulation now happens using volumetric calculations for more realistic results
Strand bending uses a more realistic approach
Controlling of child hair shapes using curve widgets
New "Spiral" kink mode to generate spirals at hair ends
Toggle buttons for render and viewport visibility were added to the particle settings in the Properties Editor
And much more!

Sculpting/Painting
Brushes/Strokes:
Improvements to rake and random mapping
Line strokes now support constrains to 45 degree increments
Texture Painting:
Support for dithering for painting on byte images
A new tool "Cavity Mask" was added that creates masks based on mesh cavities or hills
And more!

Freestyle NPR Rendering
A great memory consumption optimization in stroke rendering was done
And more!

Animation
Grease Pencil:
New Editing tools like copy & paste strokes, duplicating active layer, ...
Enable eraser on the fly while drawing with "Continuous Drawing"
Various UI tweaks such as color swatches for Stroke and Fill colors
Grease Pencil data layers are now shown in the Outliner
Improvements to the action management to reduce the cases where unused actions are deleted
Pasting keyframes can now be done flipped
Using a new "Follow" option, the animation editors can now follow the time indicator
And more!

Game Engine
Physics:
The first contact point of colliding can now be accessed from Python
Usability improvements
New option "Lock Z Velocity" to avoid micro-jumping
And more!

Add-ons
A new Auto Tile Size Add-on helps setting up the fastest tile size for Cycles rendering
Import images as planes now works for Cycles as well
POV-Ray Renderer now supports volumetric rendering
FBX and OBJ now support custom normals import
New Python API functions
And more!

More Features
There are a lot more features that are new in Blender 2.74, so make sure to check them out!

Feature Videos
Have a look at some of the above mentioned features in the demo videos made by the Blender community. Here you will also find the Developer Sneak Peak series - a video podcast series that showcases important milestones in the development of every Blender release.

Bug Fixes
As for every Blender release, hundreds of bugs were fixed, thanks to the hardworking Blender developers.