Post Description

Blender 2.72 Overview of New Features

by Gottfried Hofmann

See what’s new in Blender 2.72

Blender 2.72 has been released and with it, brought a whole host of new features, improvements and bug fixes!

New Features

From the release notes, Cycles is now capable of rendering volume and subsurface scattering on GPU, has improved control over caustics and Freestyle can now be used with Cycles. The long awaited Pie Menus is now available as an add-on. There is a new intersect tool, which is a bit like the boolean tool, but doesn’t calculate interior/exterior faces.

There have been several improvements to the texture painting work flow, including texture slots and sixteennew blend modes. Select by type and a new sun beams node has been added to the compositor. Game development now has a few new or improved actuators and there are several new add-ons, including improvements and bug fixes to the FBX import/export add-on.

Cycles Rendering
• Volume rendering and Subsurface Scattering can be rendered with GPUs.
• Volume and Glossy sampling is improved.
• New Ashikhmin-Shirley distribution enhances Glossy and Anisotropic BSDFs.
• Memory usage during rendering is improved.
• OSL rendering is faster.
• Anamorphic Bokeh support added.
• Caustics are under better control.

User Interface
• The long awaited pie menus are available as an addon for [Tab], [Z[, [Q], [Shift][Ctrl], [.], [Ctrl][Space] operators.
• New Tooltip design makes important information more noticeable.
•Python text is displayed in a monospaced font.
• Blender Internal preview now behaves like the Cycles preview; it starts rendering at low resolution and improves from there.
• Units parsing has been improved, even though developers claim Blender does not feature a units engine, it does a better job now.

Modeling
• A new Intersection Tool was added to quickly cut up geometry. It's a bit like Boolean Tool, but, does not calculate interior/exterior.
• The Bevel Tool and the Bevel Modifier now have the option to set the material of the newly created faces to the material in a given slot.

Sculpting/Painting
• Texture painting workflow has been streamlined with easy access to painted images and UV layers.
• The ability to generate strokes with curves and lines has been added.
• More blend modes are available and new tools tofill and mask have been added.

Compositing
A new Sun Beams node has been added to the compositor.

Game Development
• A new Mouse Actuator that can achieve a mouse look effect (among other things), has been added.
• The Property Sensor has new evaluation types.
• The TrackTo Actuator has new menus to select up/track axis.
• The Property Actuator has a new level mode.
• The Mouse-Over-Any Sensor has new X-Ray and Property/Material detection options.
• A new BGE Debug and Contraints Wrapper API have been added.

Freestyle NPR Rendering
The Freestyle line rendering engine has been integrated into Cycles in addition to the Blender Internal (BI). Freestyle provides Cycles users with a versatile non-photorealistic (NPR) line rendering solution. Most Freestyle options work in the same way for both Cycles and BI. Line texturesin Freestyle for Cycles are defined by means of shader nodes (unlike Freestyle for BI, which relies on the conventional texture mapping and influence panels). New per-material Freestyle line settings provide a reliable mean to specify line colors applicable to both Cycles and the BI. The Freestyle Python API also has user-visible updates for better code readability and run-time performance.

Animation (More Features)
• Color ramps now support color interpolation in hue mode both clock-wise and counter-clock-wise.
• [Ctrl][F] in Animation Editors, is a convenience shortcut to activate Filter by Name functionality.
• Weights now draw in wireframe mode in the 3D view.
• Temporary data gets deleted when closing Blender.
• The Video Editor has a new Gaussian blur filter.
• New camera presets: Blackmagic Pocket Cinema and Blackmagic Production 4K.

Addons
• FBX improvements: Import now supports armatures, shapekeys, animations, with shapekeys also being supported for export.
• New DXF importer supports 3D(SubD) geometry, and geo-referencing. It imports curves as curve obkects and adds control over various geometry merge options.
• New UV addon for align distribution and copy/paste (!!) of UVs.
• New Game Publishing Addon is available for game developers!
• New addon for named layers & grouped layer management.

14 Lessons

    01 Cycles – Additions and Improvements
    02 Cycles – Volumes
    03 Cycles – Freestyle
    04 Interface
    05 Interface – Pie Menus
    06 Modeling
    07 Modeling – Mesh Intersect Tool
    08 Paint Tools
    09 Texture Paint Slots
    10 Compositor – Sun Beams
    11 Compositor – Border and Select by Type
    12 Nodes – Color Ramps
    13 Layer Management Add-on
    14 Other Small Additions

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