14 DAY TRIAL // The Blender Foundation, the developer of Blender, an integrated 3D creation software suite, has announced that its software is now at version 2.71 RC1.
The Blender Foundation has already started to improve the 2.70 branch that was released back in March and the developers have started to implement a number of fixes and changes.
“Deforming meshes, such as animated characters including hair, can now be motion blurred. This is enabled by default on all objects in existing and new files that already have motion blur enabled. Deformation motion blur can be disabled on a per object basis, and the accuracy can be improved by using more motion blur time steps, in case two samples are not sufficient.”
“Initial support for rendering fire and smoke is now available. Smoke domain meshes now have ‘density,’ ‘flame’ and ‘color’ attributes that are accessible through the Attribute node (in a future release we will make this more convenient with a built-in smoke/fire node),” said the developers.
The developers from the Blender Foundation have also integrated other new features as well. For example, Baking is now supported for Cycles and the tool mimics most of the Blender internal baking functionality, branched path tracing now renders direct lighting for volumes with less noise, scene export is a little bit faster, the hair rendering performance has been improved, and some small improvements have been made for scenes without Transparent Shaders.
Also, transparent shadows have received a significant speedup (30-50% in some scenes), the rendering of segments/ribbons hair has been improved, the Voronoi cells texture is done faster, support has been added for multiple interpolation modes on image textures, a dedicated UV Map node has been added, Transparent Depth output has been implemented in the Light Path node, support has been added for Nvidia Maxwell cards, and the maximum number of image textures, for Kepler card and above, has been increased from 95 to 145.
Unfortunately for Linux users, the Blender developers don’t provide binaries or any other easier method of installing this complex application, like a PPA for example. This means that you will either compile the application yourself or wait until this version hits the official repositories of the distribution you are using.
A complete list of changes and updates can be found in the official changelog. You can download Blender 2.71 RC1 right now from Softpedia.
Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.