14 DAY TRIAL // Blender Foundation was proud to announce the release and immediate availability for download of version 2.77 of its open-source and cross-platform Blender 3D modeller software.
Prominent features in Blender 2.77 include GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) support for Fire, Smoke, and Point Density for the Cycles Rendering feature, along with improvements in the Subsurface Scattering functionality. Additionally, anti-aliasing for OpenGL renders has seen significant improvements.
The release also improves the workflow and adds stroke sculpting support to the Grease Pencil, implements OpenVDB caching for both volumetric and smoke simulations, and it now offers a redesigned progress bar, thus completing the design overhaul.
Furthermore, the decimate modifier was improved, there's now support for multi-line text in frame nodes, metadata display, render stamps, and tooltips, a new Edit-mode boolean tool was introduced for fast editing, and the library handling has been revamped to support the management of deleted and missing datablocks.
The weight painting and extruding tools received various small improvements, a "Max Jumps" value has been added to the character physics of the game engine, there's a new screenshot mode in the Screenshot Actuator tool of the game engine, and the Sequencer received white balance and tone map strip modifier support.
The SCons build system is no longer supported, nor Windows XP
Among other changes implemented in the Blender 2.77 maintenance release, we can mention that the SCons build system is no longer supported, nor the deprecated Microsoft Windows XP operating system. Additionally, Blender now uses the Python 3.5.1 programming language, and the popular FFMpeg multimedia backend is now used for supporting redcode.
As expected, hundreds of bugs reported by users since Blender 2.76 have been fixed, and there are numerous other under-the-hood improvements, which you can view on the official release notes. In the meantime, you can download Blender 2.77 right now from our website for the GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.