Blender 2.74 - open source 3D modeling, animation and rendering software

The Blender Foundation just released Blender 2.74 - http://www.blender.org/download/

The new viewport compositing features in Blender 2.74 add ambient occlusion and depth of field controls to Blender’s viewport, much as Viewport 2.0 did for Maya. The release also improves Blender’s hair dynamics.

• Cycles got several precision, noise, speed, memory improvements, new Pointiness attribute.
• Viewport has new cool compositing features, outliner now manages orphan datablocks better.
• Modeling now allows custom normals, and transferring data layers between meshes!
• Massive improvements to hair dynamics and editing tools: a big step forward with more to come…
• A new tool “Cavity Mask” was added to  sculpting painting, along with other improvements.
• Great memory consumption optimization in Freestyle NPR stroke rendering.
• Grease pencil and Game engine improvements, and more…

Cycles Render

Several improvements for BVH like making it watertight, solving several precision issues and reducing noise
Optimizations: black world backgrounds are now removed from the shader graph, resulting in great speed improvements, many great memory optimizations
Nodes: new Pointiness attribute for the Geometry node, control texture space of one object by another.

User Interface

New Viewport Compositing brings Ambient Occlusion and Depth of Field right into the Viewport!
View-depth can now be picked using an Eyedropper
Outliner: orphaned Datablocks Mode was added for datablock management, now allows deleting of entire object hierachies, drag & drop objects to groups.
The Node Editor can now show text-blocks in frames
Customizable camera safe areas

Modeling

Support for Custom Normals was added, and transferring data layers between meshes is now possible thanks to a new Mesh Data Transfer operator and modifier.
Tools:

• UV handling for Edge/ Vertex Slide was improved
• new inverse-square blending for proportional-edit-mode
• “Fit Camera View” now works for orthographic cameras as well
• new “Split Concave Faces” tool to ensure a convex geometry was added

Particles

Hair dynamics and editing tools were massively improved:

• Support for hair collision with meshes
• Simulation now happens using volumetric calculations for more realistic results
• Strand bending uses a more realistic approach
• Controlling of child hair shapes using curve widgets
• New “Spiral” kink mode to generate spirals at hair ends
• Toggle buttons for render and viewport visibility were added to the particle settings in the Properties Editor

Sculpting/Painting

Brushes/Strokes:

• Improvements to rake and random mapping
• Line strokes now support constrains to 45 degree increments

Texture Painting:

• Support for dithering for painting on byte images
• A new tool “Cavity Mask” was added that creates masks based on mesh cavities or hills

Freestyle Non-photorealistic Rendering

A great memory consumption optimization in stroke rendering was done.

Animation

Grease Pencil:

• New Editing tools like copy & paste strokes, duplicating active layer, …
• Enable eraser on the fly while drawing with “Continuous Drawing”
• Various UI tweaks such as color swatches for Stroke and Fill colors
• Grease Pencil data layers are now shown in the Outliner

Other:

• Improvements to the action management to reduce the cases where unused actions are deleted
• Pasting keyframes can now be done flipped
• Using a new “Follow” option, the animation editors can now follow the time indicator

Game Engine

Physics:

• The first contact point of colliding can now be accessed from Python
• Usability improvements

New option “Lock Z Velocity” to avoid micro-jumping

Add-ons

• A new Auto Tile Size Add-on helps setting up the fastest tile size for Cycles rendering
• Import images as planes now works for Cycles as well
• POV-Ray Renderer now supports volumetric rendering
• FBX and OBJ now support custom normals import
• New Python API functions

More Features

• .blend Files & Libraries: generation and saving of previews for materials, textures, lamps, world and images datablocks.
• Background images can now be rotated and flipped.
• Compositing: Plane Track Deform, Multilayer EXR nodes improved; memory usage optimization.
• Sequencer: Slip tool, Setting proxies improved; preview individual strips (feature back from Blender 2.4x)
• Added gamma node support for Blender Internal
• Added MotionTracking operator to filter tracks based on how smooth their motion is
• Many other small Improvements

Feature Videos

For a visual demonstration of some of the new features in this release, check out the feature videos created during the development of this release.

Bug Fixes

In addition to the new features, hundreds of bugs that existed in previous releases have been fixed.