A great number of features have been implemented

Mar 31, 2015 23:08 GMT  ·  By

The Blender Foundation is proud to announce today, March 31, the immediate availability for download of the Blender 2.74 free, open-source 3D modelling software that is used by many professional designers to create stunning graphics and models for Hollywood movies.

Highlights of Blender 2.74 include Cycles Render improvements, support for Custom Normals, new Viewport features, an all-new “Cavity Mask” tool, several improvements to the Game engine and Grease pencil, a number of improvements to the hair dynamics and editing tools, as well as great memory consumption optimizations in Freestyle NPR stroke rendering.

In detail, we can mention that the Cycles Render component received several memory, noise, speed, and precision improvements, as well as a brand-new Pointiness attribute for the Geometry node, which can be used to control texture space of a single object by another.

New User Interface, Modeling, Particles, Sculpting, Painting, and Animation features

The User Interface got a few enhancements as well, such as support for customizable camera safe areas, cool new Viewport compositing features that include Depth of Field and Ambient Occlusion, the ability to pick the view-depth with the Eyedropper tool, and support for deleting entire object hierarchies, as well as to drag and drop objects to groups.

The Modeling component of Blender has been improved with support for custom normals, as well as the ability to transfer data layers between meshes. In addition, the UV handling for Edge and Vertex Slide tool has been improved, a new inverse-square blending was added to proportional-edit-mode, orthographic cameras are supported by “Fit Camera View,” and a new “Split Concave Faces” tool was added to ensure a convex geometry.

In the Particles component, the hair dynamics and editing tools have been massively improved with support for hair collision with meshes, new “Spiral” kink mode, volumetric calculations for simulations, use of curve widgets for controlling child hair shapes, and other goodies.

Download Blender 2.74 for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows operating systems right now from Softpedia. Of course, Blender 2.74 brings numerous other new features, so it is recommended to check the official release notes for more details.