The Blender Foundation announced the release of the latest version of its open source 3D software. New features include:
– Motion Tracking – Motion tracking support has been added, to reconstruct camera and object animation from real footage, and composite 3D rendered object into movie clips.
– Cycles Render Engine – A new render engine that is available next to Blender Internal. It is a ray-tracing based render engine with support for interactive rendering, a new shading node system, new texture workflow and GPU acceleration.
– Dynamic Paint – A new modifier and physics system that can turn objects into paint canvases and brushes, creating vertex colors, image sequences or displacement. This makes many effects possible that were previously difficult to achieve, for example footsteps in the snow, raindrops that make the ground wet, paint that sticks to walls, or objects that gradually freeze. Dynamic Paint videos: various examples – waves – waves 2 – laser carving.
– Ocean Simulation – Ocean simulation tools take the form of a modifier, to simulate and generate a deforming ocean surface, and associated texture, used to render the simulation data. Ported from the open source Houdini Ocean Toolkit, it is intended to simulate deep ocean waves and foam.
Other improvements include: camera sensor size and presets, enhanced image saving, 3D mouse color wheel editing, more translations to other languages, node muting improvements, region drawing tweaks, and many more small changes. New Addons in this release are an Adobe After Effects exporter, Atomic Blender (Protein Data Bank) file importer, Acclaim and C3D motion capture importers, and Nuke camera animation exporter and importer.
More information at Blender.org and BlenderNation. (Note: The Blender Foundation’s server may be experiencing slow response times)
