The Blender Foundation and the online developer community are proud to present Blender 2.74, released Mar 31 2015!
- Cycles got several precision, noise, speed, memory improvements, new Pointiness attribute.
- Viewport has new cool compositing features, outliner now manages orphan datablocks better.
- Modeling now allows custom normals, and transferring data layers between meshes!
- Massive improvements to hair dynamics and editing tools: a big step forward with more to come…
- A new tool “Cavity Mask” was added to sculpting/painting, along with other improvements.
- Great memory consumption optimization in Freestyle NPR stroke rendering.
- Grease pencil and Game engine improvements, and more…
New in Blender 2.74
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, many great memory optimizations
Nodes: new Pointiness attribute for the Geometry node, control texture space of one object by another
New Viewport Compositing brings Ambient Occlusion and Depth of Field right into the Viewport!
View-depth can now be picked using an Eyedropper
Outliner: orphaned Datablocks Mode was added for datablock management, now allows deleting of entire object hierachies, drag & drop objects to groups.
The Node Editor can now show text-blocks in frames
Customizable camera safe areas
Support for Custom Normals was added, and transferring data layers between meshes is now possible thanks to a new Mesh Data Transfer operator and modifier.
Tools:
- UV handling for Edge/ Vertex Slide was improved
- new inverse-square blending for proportional-edit-mode
- “Fit Camera View” now works for orthographic cameras as well
- new “Split Concave Faces” tool to ensure a convex geometry was added
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
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
Other:
- 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
- .blend Files & Libraries: generation and saving of previews for materials, textures, lamps, world and images datablocks.
- Viewport: Background images can now be rotated and flipped.
- Compositing: Plane Track Deform, Multilayer EXR nodes improved; memory usage optimization.
- Sequencer: Slip tool, Setting proxies improved; preview individual strips (feature back from Blender 2.4x)
- Blender Internal: Added gamma node support
- Motion Tracking: Added operator to filter tracks based on how smooth their motion is
- Freestyle: Great memory consumption optimization in stroke rendering
- Game Engine:
Physics: The first contact point of colliding can now be accessed from Python and usability improvements
Path Following: New option “Lock Z Velocity” to avoid micro-jumping - Many small improvements
For a visual demonstration of some of the new features in this release, check out the feature videos created during the development of this release.
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