14 DAY TRIAL // Cross-platform 3D animation tool Blender 2.70 is out for download on OS X, Windows, and Linux. The first of a new series, Blender 2.7 comes with UI improvements and a lot of features added for Cycles render, motion tracking, animation, modeling, etc.
The first version of the app to include support for volumetrics in Cycles, the new Blender 2.7 can achieve faster rendering of hair and textures, while the motion tracker now supports weighted tracks and has improved planar tracking.
There are new Laplacian deform and wireframe modifiers for mesh modeling and the bevel tool offers more control. The game engine can handle object levels of detail, and the UI has been tweaked quite a lot. The Blender Foundation explains:
“The first results from the new user interface project are also in this release, with dozens of changes to make the interface more consistent and powerful. This is also the first release of the multithreaded dependency graph, which makes modifier and constraint evaluation faster in scenes with multiple objects.”
A very important new addition, Cycles does volume rendering with emission, absorption, and scattering for effects like fire, smoke, mist, absorption in glass, etc.
CPU rendering performance is improved, and Trackers can now be weighted. This helps keep the result stable as features become difficult to track or disappear altogether.
Tabs now allow users to organize their favorite tools in categories. The developer explains that “Multiple buttons can now be edited at once, for example for XYZ axes or color channels. Transform tools now have a mode to enter expressions and units. Other changes were done to improve lists, header menus, tooltips, buttons, menus and more.”
The threaded dependency graph allows for object modifiers and constraints to be computed with multiple threads. This can be leveraged on multicore processors.
“This will be most noticeable with scenes that have many objects, or multiple objects with heavy modifiers. This is the first step in making the dependency graph in Blender more powerful,” the Blender Foundation elaborates.
Game developers will be pleased to learn that the app’s game engine now supports discrete level of detail for meshes. Working with Photoshop PSD files is possible now, and a new view navigation walk mode has been added for first-person shooter-inspired projects.
“This can be useful for game developers to navigate levels as if in a game,” the developer says.
Download Blender 2.7 for Mac OS X