Blender News

Time to prepare for a new release. And this is no ordinary release. This will be the last one before 2.8!

Blender developers have been hard at work, introducing an astonishing number of fixes and new features, for a release that will be truly epic.

We are talking about :

• Denoising
• OpenCL performance (up to 5x faster with AMD cards)
• Shadow Catcher
• Principled BSDF (Disney shaders)
• Filmic Color Management
• Improved Alembic I/O
• Improved Pose Library for Animation
• An so much more
• New add-ons (a dedicated article is coming soon)

Check out the WIP release notes to learn more.



You can be the real hero and help us testing, before we move to Release Candidate stage! To do so, simply visit the Blender 2.79 test build download page and get the Blender version that fits your OS.

If you find a problem, head to developer.blender.org and let us know!

If you want so see some cool projects made with Blender, check out the user Stories on blender.org. But what about you? What is the feature you are the most excited about? What do you expect for the future of Blender?

The latest update to Blender 2.78 is out! Get it now to boost your Cycles rendering performance and get rock-solid stability. Here is the massive update list!

• Multithreaded shader compilation and optimizations for emission meshes
  
• More efficient noise reduction for Branched Path Tracing
  
• Unused shader nodes are now ignored on render time
  
• Improvements to procedural textures
  
• Fireflies reduction for background textures when using MIS
  
• Different seed for subframes and different stereo views, allowing "slow-motion" effect and improved VR experience
  
• Distance culling for objects to remove objects which are too far away from the camera
  
• Better remaining time estimation
  
• Various optimizations and fixes for deformation motion blur
  
• Added time steps BVH option to speed up rendering of scenes with motion blur
  
• Hair particle settings were moved to Geometry panel of Render context
  
• Beckmann/GGX distribution with 0 roughness is now considered a singular ray
  

• Use XDG folder for cache on Linux and OSX, which avoids having per-Blender version folder with all the OpenCL/CUDA kernels built.
  
• Ability to enable/disable individual GPUs as opposite to old behaviour with pre-defined combinations only. Not only this helps to some artists, but also makes it possible to have flexible benchmark scripting.
  

• Use more global SSE optimizations for SSE4.1+ kernels.
  
• Multiple improvements for the latest AVX2 CPUS:
  
• Optimized various math utilities (cross-products, dot-products, min-axis-selection and others).
  
• Faster version of triangle intersection function.
  
• Optimization of various steps in BVH traversal algorithm (including both construction and traversal).
  

• Added 3D textures support for OpenCL
  
• Major render time improvements on transparent shadows
  

• Optimization of dependency graph construction time
  
• Fix missing or wrong relation links, which were causing hard-to-reproduce bone flickering in complex rigs
  
• Fix various crashes related on linked data blocks
  
• Fixes for missing animation updates
  

• Fixed regression crash when adding texture node to compositor
  
• Fixed crash of inverse kinematics on 32 bit Windows platforms
  
• Improve multi-threaded usage of fluid simulation
  
• Return correct alpha for environment map in GLSL
  

Check out how the massive motion blur render time improvements were made possible in the latest film project at the Blender Institute

For more detailed release docs, check out the wiki

If you follow the production of Agent 327 at Blender Institute, you might have heard about the massive motion blur rendering speed-up recently introduced in Blender (for more info check out the Blender Cloud blogpost).

This is just one of the many improvements that will be available in the upcoming Blender 2.78b. Preview builds will be announced soon.


Now, to the second part of this article: we love to share news about Blender and the projects around it, but we want to hear from you!

What kind of news do you expect from the Steam portal and what would you like to see happening here? In which language would you like to see it? What do you use Bender for?

Francesco

The Blender Foundation and online developer community are proud to present Blender 2.78a.



Your own 3D software is now better than ever.

Tons of new features, optimizations, speed-ups, fixes, support for new hardware and Alembic file format. The list goes on and on: blender.org/features/2-78/

Blender is 100% open source. Free to use for any purpose, forever.

The next release of Blender (2.78) is coming very soon! Official test builds for it are now available. Also check the release logs for 2.78 in our wiki.

Some of the most notable features:

• Grease Pencil 2
  
• Alembic I/O
  
• Cycles Renderer (stereo render, support for latest GPUs and more)
  
• Modeling Tools (freehand curve drawing too, new dissolve too and more)
  
• Animation Tools (bendy bones and more)
  
• Blender Preferences sync with Blender Cloud

Go ahead, download the Release Candidate and report any issue or bug you encounter before the final release!