The Blender Foundation and online developer community is proud to present Blender 2.63a. The 2.6x series is being targeted at including all work that happened in branches or patches past years.
This release was focused on integrating and stabilizing the long awaited BMesh modelling system, which has full support for N-sided polygons and many new modelling tools. New tools include Dissolve, Inset, Bridge, Vertex Slide, Vertex Connect, Bevel, and improved versions of Knife, Subdivide and Rip.
Check the list below for highlights and the full changelog.
2.63 release: April 27th, 2012.
2.63a release: May 10, 2012
BMesh is the new Blender mesh system with full support for N-sided polygons instead of only triangles and quads.
In particular there is a new Dissolve tool to remove vertices, edges and faces without making holes in the mesh, a new Inset tool to inset faces, and a much improved Knife tool which takes advantage of N-gons to generate clear cuts. Tools such as subdivide and loop cut will also generate clean topology because faces no longer have to be triangulated.
Portions of the mesh can now be hidden in sculpt mode to improve performance and sculpt parts of the mesh that would otherwise be difficult to access.
Other new features include a Movie Clip option for the Sequencer, a compositing node to output multiple files or multilayer EXR files, new tools for linking and detaching nodes, more particle rotation options, and Linux support for drag n' drop from external applications.
Among the features added in this release are support for a panoramic camera, mirror ball environment textures, and float precision textures.
Also new are render layer mask layers, a shadow render pass, ambient occlusion, and viewport display of background images and render layers.
Motion tracking got a few smaller improvements, mostly related to 2D stabilization and a few smaller tools.
Various options were added to imports and exporters, an Atomic Blender PDB exporter was added, and Renderfarm.fi now supports Cycles.
This release was mainly focused on stabilizing BMesh, but also includes 150 fixes for bugs that existed in previous releases.
