Blender 2.61 release today

[NewsMaker]

Forum: CG News
Posted By: DanielWray
Post Time: 12-14-2011 at 12:28 PM
Text:

BLENDER 2.61 INTRODUCES NEW RENDER ENGINE, MOTION TRACKING!

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.

CYCLES RENDER


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.

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. 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.

Note: object tracking just missed the deadline, but will likely be in the next 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.

OCEAN SIM


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.

Since The Blender foundation switched to a 2 month release schedule, there?s been a veritable avalance of new features, and there?s no sign of the pace slowing down with the next release coming in about 2 months time. If you appreciate the effort put in by the Blender coding team, please consider donating ! =)

These are exciting times for Blenderheads!

For full release log and download, go HERE !

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