Revolved surfaces with Curves

This is a much faster and easier way to give a beveled curve a taper, without using taper curves. Each point on a curve now has a 'radius' value that you can shrink and fatten using Alt S, which will influence the taper when the curve is bevelled (either with a 'bevob', or with front/back turned off and a bevel depth set). Alt S shrinks and fattens the selected points in an interactive transform, and you can set an absolute radius for selected points with 'Set Radius' in the curve specials menu.

See demo videos:

curve_shrinkfatten

wineglass

Verse-Blender

Not released in our binaries, but integrated in sources now: Verse support in Blender (3d protocol to connect multiple applications).

Development docs

User docs

 

Animate, UI, Outliner, Developer notes

Animation

  • New weight-paint option that only paints on vertices that have already the weight-group assigned before.
  • Weight Paint: Options now now show in 3D Window, with (Nkey) "Properties" panel
  • Added Vertex weight groups in Lattices (for deformation). Only editable with buttons.
  • Vertex-parenting for Lattices works now (ctrl+p in editmode)
  • Pose mode: Pkey selects parent bones
  • Action Editor: selection option Column (K-key) to select all keys on 1 frame.
  • Action Editor:  added SHIFT+A "Add Action Strip" menu to NLA editor
  • NLA: strips can become muted. Option is in Properties panel only.
  • NLA: drawn strips now follows Scene layer visibility
  • Constraints: renaming now also renames constraint channels (Ipos) in own Actions
  • 3D Window: option added to allow to lock a view to an Object or Bone, so it always shows centered. Nice to track objects with long walkcycles, for example.
  • 3D Windowm Pose mode: use Shift+M to set layers of bones.
  • Static particles: New option "Max Length", to allow forcefields to act without resulting in extreme strand lengths.
  • Time markers now are available in all time-related window types.

UI

  • Tablet pressure support for Windows, X11, OS X
  • Hotkey Q became CTRL+Q, to prevent accidents and for compatibility.
  • Colorband: maximum amount of keys now is 32
  • Curves widget: now supports extending values too.
  • Ipo Editor: Mirror menu (Mkey)
  • 3D View: "View Properties" allows to set subdivision levels of a grid unit (set it to 12 to mimic foot and inches).
  • 3D View: new  user preset allows to set rotation step for hotkeys numpad 2-4-6-8.
  • 3D View: SHIFT+B zooms in to border, for ortho views.
  • 3D View: UV FaceSelect mode now shows textured faces in "Solid view".
  • Appending/Linking data from other files (SHIFT+F1): File window now has a menu to directly browse into previously opened files.
  • File selecting now can show international fonts; this is still a compile option (not in releases). Scons: WITH_BF_ICONV, Make: WITH_ICONV
  • Button numerical value input: you now don't have to type a '#' for python expression evaluation, it does it by default now (so type "3+8" and you get "11").
  • Icons now can be loaded from an external file too, using the $HOME/.blender/icons/ directory. This is WIP that will be finalized for a next release.
  • Undo-redo now restores Images (it used to free images, enforcing reloads).
  • Undo-redo now restores Referenced Library data too, making it much faster for complex projects.
  • Weight-paint and Vertex-paint now uses the regular global Undo (it used to be 1 step only)

Outliner

  • Restriction options for objects added, to define visibility in 3D window, in Renders or being selectable
  • New view option "Libraries", CTRL+click on library name allows editing it
  • Finding data option added, Fkey (strings) CTRL+F (case sensitive), SHIFT+F (repeat last search)
  • X or DEL now invokes deleting selected Objects as well.
  • LMB drag to select items
  • Speedup for redrawing, on events such as: pageup/down, scrollwheel, MMB scroll, search item, show active item, toggle selection

Developer

  • Guarded memory alloc now is thread-safe
  • 'Windows mode' for memory use: on malloc or free, memory is set to 0xFFFFFFFF to force crashes when using it still. (active for blender -d)
  • Mesh data system was recoded to support multiple levels of "Custom Data" now. This will make files not upward compatible after 2.43 (now it saves data twice even... making files too big temporary).
  • CMake was added in the code, to replace regular make in due time
  • Blender files now have a sub-version, for more precise version patching.
  • Blender files now also have a "minimum version" written, for the future to warn on upward compatibility issues (i.e. when we change mesh format, older binaries will warn you when reading newer files).
  • Klockwork provided us with free code analysis, giving vulnerabilities you would easily miss. This resulted in a dozen of important bugfixes already.

Custom ID properties

The bird model has three custom string properties, which give author and copyright information about the model.

Blender now supports saving custom data in many datatypes.  This includes materials, scenes, objects, meshes, etc.  Eventually this system will be used by renderers and game engines to store data in .blends, for much more natural integration with programs like Yafray and Crystal Space 3D.

Unfortunately, this couldn't be integrated with blender very well for this release.  Still, custom data properties can be used by python scripts to store data in things, and also by artists to save comments in objects (like name, copyright, email, etc).  Anyone can view and edit custom data properties with the ID Property Browser script in the Help menu.

To read more about the developer side of custom data properties, see the relevant page on the developer wiki.

 

Collada import/export

Collada in Blender now has support for animation and armature data.

Illusoft project website.

 

Model, Group, Shade, Render, Compo...

Modeling

  • Mesh: Knife cutting tool enhanced
  • Mesh: Proportional edit option "Random falloff".
  • Curve: Four new selection options; select more/less and select first/last. All in menus/toolbox.

Grouping

  • Dupli-Groups: this now can be recursive, so a duplicated group can be inside of a Group. And so on! For security, recursion level will stop at 5 deep now.
  • Groups now have layer flag buttons, allows to define which of the objects in a group should be drawn by a Dupli-Group.
  • Adding groups from libraries now is sorted in the menu per referenced file.

Shading

  • New nodes: Camera Info, Scalar Math, Vector Math, Value Squeeze node
  • Node socket types now can all be connected, using automatic conversions.
  • Autoclip in Lampbuffers (note, only checks visible vertices)
  • Texture plugin now has a callback so each instance can initialize own data.
  • Image Texture: support for mirrored tiling added

Render

  • Support added for rendering up to 8 threads (each thread does 1 full tile, allocating full memory for it). Commandline: -t <threads>.
  • Using angular maps for sky now renders camera position correctly
  • New Renderlayer option "All Z values" will fill in the Z of all faces from other render-layers too. Nice for masking out parts.

Composite 

  • Combine RGBA node
  • Dilate/Erode node
  • File Output node added
  • Rotate/Scale node
  • Split-view node
  • Nodes can draw transparent (see Theme editor)
  • Backdrop draw option for active Viewer node
  • Important fix: in 2.42a all nodes were always executed on changes, dependency graph failed.
  • RGBA curves node: now extends (extrapolates) values.
  • Timenode: When active, Ikey inserts value on current frame


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