The Blender Foundation announced a new major release of the open source 3D software. New features include:
- Spherical Stereo images rendering support for VR
- Grease Pencil is now a full 2D drawing and animation tool
- Cycles render engine optimizations, support for GTX NVIDIA 10×0, better subdivision and micro displacement experimental feature improved
- Viewport Rendering improvements
- New Freehand curves drawing over surfaces
- Bendy Bones, powerful new options for B-Bones
- Alembic support: import/export basic operators
- Cloth Physics: new Dynamic Base Mesh and Simulation Speed option
- New add-ons including Archviz-related and precision modeling tools, Python APIs changes, and a lot of new and updated add-ons
- Blender ID add-on, which allows you to be logged-in within Blender so that other (3rd party) add-ons can provide you with a more tailored experience. For example, with the Blender Cloud add-on you will be able to synchronize your preferences across multiple workstations.
Plus many other improvements and bug fixes. More on Blender’s website.
BFF!
Getting more features then any other 3D application every release.
The beauty of open-source development.
All those on this site who complains about X or Y 3D application features during the various releases – should give blender a real good chance.
I am not sure. Many high end industry standard applications are very cheap nowadays. Maya LT, Houdini indie, Substance Designer, Mari indie, ZBrushCore, Unreal. Blender is not considered a prestigious application in the industry. However the best thing is its art community with excellent free tutorials available. Alembic for example or fbx is something very common between applications. Blender comes very late to this game.
Indeed. I wish Blender fans wouldn’t get their personal excitement of Blender’s development as some sort of measure of Blender “being the future.” It’s hard to be the future when it’s constantly trying to catch up to the past.
Given its ad-hoc nature and for-the-community sense of prioritization with development (rather than industry feedback), Blender will always be behind the curve in terms of development.
To over-celebrate the small victories such as addition of (basic, not complete) support of Alembic and still-incomplete FBX support is to manifest just why nobody in wider industry uses Blender much.
Of course, this doesn’t mean Blender’s not a handy tool, that it hasn’t gotten some cool developments over the years, or that we can’t appreciate this new version. It’s a good thing and I’m glad it’s out there. It’s certainly got its perks as well.
It just means that Blender fans need to be realists when it comes to always comparing Blender to other software–it doesn’t compare. Maya and Max and other software aren’t perfect, but they’re far beyond the scope of Blender, as fr as industry-strength use is concerned.
Because Blender fans have been singing this same tune for a decade now. And at the way Blender Foundation operates, planning purely on their own whim, Blender fans will be singing this same tune 10 years from now.
I was waiting for alembic for so long!!! Now we can finally have a solid pipeline houdini-blender. One of the best things about it is that it preserve the cameras, so now his tracking feature and animation may be appealling for more people. Cycles is getting solid -missing edge shader and better caustics-refraction for glass- It may not be the fastest or appealling, but after trying vray and modo renderer I can say it’s one of the easier render engine to work on ilumination and shader.