Blender 3D Modeling And Animation Software

Blender 2.60

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Blender 2.60:

The Blender Foundation and online developer community is proud to present Blender 2.60. This is the beginning of the Blender 2.6x series, targeted at including all work that happened in branches or patches past years.
Most notable in this release is 3D audio, UI translation, improved weight painting and a lot of animation system updates. Check the list below for highlights and the full changelog.
Released: October 19th, 2011.
Update: Blender 2.60a has been released now - 24 October, 2011. It has a dozen of essential fixes for the 2.60 version. See the changelog for 2.60a here.

3D audio & video

3D audio and speaker objects were added, along with various improvements to the sound system. It's now possible to place speaker objects in the scene, make an animation and mix down to an audio file. Sequence editor proxy support was restored, which can now work in the background, along with support for building timecodes to make scrubbing on all video types possible.

Vertex weight groups

Vertex group modifiers were added. There are three modifiers: one to edit existing vertex groups, one to mix groups together, and another to generate vertex groups based on proximity to other objects. Weight painting tools were added to lock vertex groups, automatically maintain the ratio between different bones, and for fixing poor deformation of vertices.

Game Engine

Navigation Meshes were added for the game engine, used for path finding, so that actors can find the path to a target or flee away. This functionality was implemented using the Recast & Detour libraries.
Texture Face settings moved to materials, for consistency and easier editing. Existing files may need some updates.
Game engine animation was improved internally, with as main external change the unification of F-Curve and Shape Action Actuators into a single Action Actuator, which now includes layering support.

Add-ons

Two new addons have been added to the release: Screencast Keys, to show key presses on the screen for making video tutorials, and Motion Capture Tools, which includes various tools for working with motion capture animation. There have also been various fixes and improvements to importers and exporters, the measure panel, paint palettes, renderfarm.fi uploader, ... see the list of addon changes for details.

Animation system

Animation system improvements were done, especially relating to usability and to polish the interface. Includes changes to the graph editor, dopesheet editor, NLA editor, curves, drivers, constraints, posing, ... Collada integration was improved, making import and export more complete and fixing various issues, especially related to armatures and animation.

UI translation

Internationalization and support for non-western fonts were added, to display the user interface in languages other than English. Efforts to translate in the most common languages is underway, and volunteers are welcome to contribute translations.

More features

Various other features have been added, including a frame node, sequence editor utility operators, improved outliner search, grease pencil poly line drawing, performance improvements, ... List of changes.

Python

New python API features include callbacks for various events, GLSL shader export, environment map texture load/save, texture evaluation and various other utilities.
The behavior of Vector() * Matrix() multiplication was also modified, this may require some script updates.
List of changes.

Bug fixes

While many new features have been added, many bugs have also been fixed, see the list of 165 notable bug fixes.

Blender 2.61

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The Blender Foundation and online developer community is proud to present Blender 2.61. The 2.6x series is being targeted at including all work that happened in branches or patches past years.
Most notable in this release is the new render engine Cycles, the Camera Tracker, Ocean Simulation texture and Dynamic Paint. Check the list below for highlights and the full changelog.
Released: December 14th, 2011.

Cycles Render Engine

Cycles is a new render engine that is available next to Blender Internal. It is a raytracing based render engine with support for interactive rendering, a new shading node system, new texture workflow and GPU acceleration. It is still in development, and more production features are planned to be added, this is the first preview release.

Dynamic Paint

Dynamic paint is 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.

More features

Camera sensor size and presets, improved image saving, 3D mouse color wheel editing, more translations to other languages, node muting improvements, region drawing tweaks, and many more small changes.

Add-ons

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.

Motion Tracking

Motion tracking support has been added, to reconstruct camera animation from real footage, and composite 3d rendered object into movie clips. A new Movie Clip editor for loading clips, tracking points and reconstructing motion was added. Constraints can apply this reconstructed motion into the scene, and compositing nodes are available for (un)distorting rendered animations or real footage.

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.

Python API

The render engine API has been extended for closer integration, a mechanism to detect changes in scenes and persistent callbacks were added, the noise module was updated, and easier access to library datablocks was added, along with various other changes.

Bug fixes

180 bugs that existed in previous releases have been fixed!