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Feb 20, 2014 13:54 GMT  ·  By

Blender Foundation, the developer of Blender, an integrated 3D creation software suite, has announced that its software has reached version 2.70.

The Blender Foundation has revealed the release of another major update, bringing even more features to an application that was already brimming with cool stuff.

One of the most important features to have been implemented in the latest build is Volume Rendering.

“Volume rendering can be used to render effects like fire, smoke, mist, absorption in glass, and many other effects that can't be represented by surface meshes alone.”

“To set up a volume, you create a mesh that defines the bounds within which the volume exists. In the material you typically remove the surface nodes and instead connect volume nodes to define the shading inside the volume. For effects such as absorption in glass you can use both a surface and volume shader. The world can also use a volume shader to create effects such as mist,” read the official release notes.

Highlights of Blender 2.70: • CPU rendering has been made faster by using SSE instructions; • Direct and Indirect sample values can now be clamped individually to reduce fireflies (indirect) while keeping direct highlights; • The plane track now gives real perspective warping instead of providing some faced texture mapping; • Collapsing header menus has been moved into the header menu, while keeping the collapsed menu accessible without having to expand; • The Laplacian Deform modifier allows you to pose a mesh while preserving geometric details of the surface; • Threaded dependency graph is about solving threading issues and supporting objects update from multiple threads; • Freestyle-related Python modules have been reorganized in line with the bpy module and its submodules.

A complete list of changes and updates can be found in the official changelog.

Download Blender 2.70 RC for Linux Download Blender 2.70 RC for Windows Download Blender 2.70 RC for Mac

Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.