A lengthy 5 months development time... so a release packed with interesting new features and improvements! The most noteworthy additions are the Soft Body system, the new incremental Subdivision Surface code, and the full recode of the internal Transformation system, allowing much more control and flexibility.
Even with careful testing and uploading pre-release binaries, we got our share of bugs reported... with over 100,000 downloads in the first week of release, nothing can beat testing on that level!
Fortunately only two issues could be noted as real bad bugs that absolutely required an update release. Most of the other fixes are part of our standard maintenance anyway.
New Transformation options include; To Sphere, Push/Pull, TrackBall, advanced constraint options, Proportional editing with connection mode, ...
As result of the Transformation Tools recode, we can now finally add widgets to have easy access to (constrainted) translation, rotation and scaling. Widgets can be aligned global, local to Objects and to normals in Edit Mode as well.
Each Object in Blender now can get a "Soft Body" effect applied. Once applied, the softbody system converts vertex locations to free moving particles... great for animating flexible objects, for wriggling skin and even for cloth simulations.
Especially for Soft Body a new force field, Wind, has been added. Also deflections (collisions) are possible between soft objects and Meshes.
Best feature of Daniel Dunbar's new "CCG" SubSurf system is its tremendous speed improvement. This mostly thanks to detecting incremental changes while editing. Also creases and UV texture support has been improved.
Blender now supports transparent rendering with filtering, by use of a new method which uses both Alpha and Filter combined. Ray-traced images now also deliver correct a alpha layer.
Three more options in the render core. Owners of dual CPU systems can now render twice as fast! Color definition internally is full 4x32 bits (was 4x16) and the ortho render code was refreshed.
The new Timeline window allows access to all animation timing features, with non blocking animation playback. Edit keys, materials or Soft Body while it moves!
Another long list of new features in the Python API, with new modules and advanced integration of scripts in the Blender Window system using "Space Handlers".
With a special thanks to Jacques Guignot, we've dedicated this release to him.
New Python Armature options, Z-offset materials, and SDL support for Joysticks.
Creating full pages with logs per new feature would postpone the release another month. So check this page for a full listing of all new features in 2.37.
(Image from blender3d.org gallery, Sacha Goedegebure)
In the past 5 months, over 600 reports were handled. Still, the total amount of open issues for Blender is less than thirty at the moment of release, quite impressive!
(Image from blender3d.org gallery, Alex Cope)
New TimeLine window isn't upward compatible... that means that older Blender releases crash on reading files with a TimeLine window active. This crash has been fixed in 2.37 to not happen again when we add new window types, but that won't help older versions. :)
Yafray: Support was added for options for the upcoming release of Yafray. At this moment we're still waiting for that... documents will be published later too.
Hidden stuff
People who have contributed code for this release:
And of course thanks to those who helped with demos, testing, docs, bug hunting, webpages, bug reports, testing builds, and so on... great work all!