For those of you that like living on the bleeding edge, RC2 of the upcoming Blender 2.7 is now available. If nothing else it gives you an idea of what is coming in Blender 2.74.
Cycles Rendering
- Several improvements for BVH like making it watertight, solving several precision issues and reducing noise
- Optimizations:
- Black world backgrounds are now removed from the shader graph, resulting in great speed improvements
- Various (and great!) memory optimizations
- Nodes:
- New Pointiness attribute for the Geometry node
- Control texture space of one object by another
- And more!
User Interface
- New Viewport Compositing brings Ambient Occlusion and Depth of Field right into the Viewport!
- View-depth can now be picked using an Eyedropper
- Outliner:
- An Orphaned Datablocks Mode was added for datablock management
- Deleting of entire object hierarchies
- Drag&Drop objects to groups
- The Node Editor can now show text-blocks in frames
- Customizable camera safe areas
- And more!
Modeling
- Support for Custom Normals was added
- Transferring data layers between meshes is now possible thanks to a new Mesh Data Transfer operator and modifier
- Tools:
- UV handling for Edge- and Vertex Slide was improved
- Inverse-square blending for proportional-edit-mode
- "Fit Camera View" now works for orthographic cameras as well
- A "Split Concave Faces" tool to ensure a convex geometry was added
- And more!
Particles
- Hair dynamics and editing tools were improved massively:
- Support for hair collission with meshes
- Simulation no happens using volumetric calculations for more realistic results
- Strand bending uses a more realistic approach
- Controlling of child hair shapes using curve widgets
- New "Spiral" kink mode to generate spirals at hair ends
- Toggle buttons for render and viewport visibility were added to the particle settings in the Properties Editor
- And much more!
Sculpting/Painting
- Brushes/Strokes:
- Improvements to rake and random mapping
- Line strokes now support constrains to 45 degree increments
- Texture Painting:
- Support for dithering for painting on byte images
- A new tool "Cavity Mask" was added that creates masks based on mesh cavities or hills
- And more!
Freestyle NPR Rendering
- A great memory consumption optimization in stroke rendering was done
- And more!
Animation
- Grease Pencil:
- New Editing tools like copy & paste strokes, duplicating active layer, …
- Enable eraser on the fly while drawing with "Continuous Drawing"
- Various UI tweaks such as color swatches for Stroke and Fill colors
- Grease Pencil data layers are now shown in the Outliner
- Improvements to the action management to reduce the cases where unused actions are deleted
- Pasting keyframes can now be done flipped
- Using a new "Follow" option, the animation editors can now follow the time indicator
- And more!
Game Engine
- Physics:
- The first contact point of colliding can now be accessed from Python
- Usability improvements
- New option "Lock Z Velocity" to avoid micro-jumping
- And more!
Add-ons
- A new Auto Tile Size Add-on helps setting up the fastest tile size for Cycles rendering
- Import images as planes now works for Cycles as well
- POV-Ray Renderer now supports volumetric rendering
- FBX and OBJ now support custom normals import
- New Python API functions
- And more!
More Features
There are a lot more features that are new in Blender 2.74, so make sure to check them out!
It may be a minor thing, but that “fit camera view” fix is certainly going to make my life a happier thing. Full release notes are available here. You can download the RC2 release here. Or wait 2-4 weeks for the full release.
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