Friday, February 22, 2013

Blender 2.66 Released!

Unless you missed the news, Blender 2.66 has now been released, with a quite a few high profile goodies for you to play with!



Some of the highlights in this release include:
  • Bullet Rigid Body Integration - At long last, this project by Sergej and myself is now in trunk/released. Now you don't need to fire up the game engine to simulate rigid body physics anymore. While this is already quite functional already, we've got a bunch of goodies lined up to look forward to in the coming releases... Stay tuned!
  • Cycles Hair Render - The renders coming out from this new feature are already quite breathtaking, especially for a feature that's technically still marked as "experimental". /methinks it's just an open invitation for some crazier setups to emerge ;)
  • Dyntopo - The "ZBrush killer" coolness. Especially useful with the "snake hook" brush IIRC, though I still have to figure out how/why my attempts to date have always ended up skewed to one side. "#perspective" haha
  • Laplacian Smooth Modifier - The "caricature my mesh" feature. Those camels and monkey heads are epic!
  • Matcaps - Pretty shiny things. In your viewport. In realtime. 'nuff said.
  • Visual Polish..
    • Viewport gradients (yay!), 
    • Transparent region overlays in 3D View (check), 
    • DPI setting for all UI components (aka the "make icons ridiculously big so you can admire them in detail" feature)
  • User Preferences and Startup File separation - Finally!
  • Bugfixes
    • Undo doesn't trash your unkeyed poses on proxy-protected layers anymore
    • Death to the unwanted bone roll flipping problems (hopefully we've really fixed the problems now)
    • Some TLC for the Skeleton Sketching tools
  • and last but not least: A great looking splash! Congrats to Lucas and the judges for this round on a great selection.

Since 2.66 has now been released, and the SVN freeze is over, it's time to start clearing a little backlog of changes I've been sitting on for the past few weeks :)

Enjoy!

No comments:

Post a Comment