Versie 2.77 van het opensource- en crossplatform-3d-programma Blender is uitgekomen. Deze applicatie is bedoeld voor 3d-modelling, animatie, rendering, post-production, interactive creation en playback. Meer informatie over de uitgebreide mogelijkheden van Blender kan op deze pagina worden gevonden. Met dit programma zijn onder meer de korte opensource-animatiefilms Elephants Dream, Big Buck Bunny, Sintel en Tears of Steel gemaakt. Afgelopen augustus is de tien minuten durende Cosmos Laundromat verschenen en het is de bedoeling dat dit uiteindelijk tot een volledige speelfim leidt. Uitgebreide releasenotes kunnen op deze pagina worden gevonden en dit zijn in het kort de belangrijkste verbeteringen:
Main highlights for this release:
- Cycles Rendering has better Subsurface Scattering, GPU support for Smoke/Fire and Point Density, and a few other features and optimizations.
- User Interface has faster OpenGL rendering and better Anti-Aliasing, and other improvements
- Modeling now has an edit-mode boolean tool, better decimate modifier, selection tools
- Sequencer has a Gaussian Blur effect speedup, and other strip and modifier improvements
- Sculpting/Painting has better extruding and weight painting tools
- Animation has a new constraint interpolation method, and improvements in graph editor, dope sheet, armatures and motion paths
- Grease pencil now has stroke sculpting, and several other workflow improvements
- Library handling has been improved to better manage missing and deleted datablocks
- Game Engine has a few new small features
- A new Add-on supports packing .blend files and their dependencies, some other IO Add-on was improved, and Python was upgraded
- OpenVDB caching is now supported for smoke/volumetric simulations, multithreading is now massively supported, and also 2D stabilization node, Image editor, Cubemap and spotlights were improved
- Support for Windows XP was removed, and the SCons build system too.
- And, as usual, a massive bug fixing!