Download Blender 2.64

Version 2.64 of the open source and cross platform 3D program Blender has been released. This application is for 3d modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive creation and playback. More information about the extensive possibilities of Blender can be found on this page are being found. This program includes the open source animation movies Elephant’s Dream, Big Buck Bunny, cinder and the recently released Tears of Steel made.

The focus of this release was on creating a full VFX pipeline, with improved motion tracking using a planar tracker, easier green-screen keying, and a new mask editor. A new tile-based compositing system was added, along with more advanced color management. Cycles rendering received dozens of minor features and improvements, resulting from its use in a production environment.

Sculpting now supports masks and a skin modifier has been added to create a model from skeletons on the fly. The game engine has improved shadows and physics options, and Collada export now has more options for fine-tuning exporting to other game engines. The full changelog for this release looks like this:

Mask Editor

Masks can now be created in the image and movie clip editor. They can be used in compositing to define areas of influence for nodes or block out unwanted objects. A mask datablock was added, consisting of splines that can be drawn and edited with the usual tools. Feathering can be controlled per spline point. Animation of these masks is possible with standard keyframing and following motion tracks.

Motion Tracker

Motion tracking was significantly improved by adding planar tracking, and unifying the existing trackers into one Hybrid tracker with finer control. A dopesheet view for markers was added in addition to the curves view. Tripod solving is now supported, for the case where the camera only rotates without moving.

Green Screen

Two new compositing nodes have been developed which are aimed at making green screen keying easier. There is now a new keying node conveniently combining various features from existing nodes along with a new keying algorithm, to makes setup much faster. There is also a keying screen node which produces a gradiented plate to deal with uneven colors of green screens.

Mesh Tools

Bevel and inset now are modal operator with mouse control, a wire frame tool was added to turn edges into wireframe tubes, and vertex/edge/face sorting tools were improved.

sculpture

Sculpting has received some major improvements such has masking to control which areas of the mesh are influenced by sculpting, new brush map modes to control how textures are projected onto the model, and an input stroke averaging option to make brush strokes smoother.

skin modifier

The Skin modifier takes a skeleton made up of vertices and edges as input and generates a polygon skin as output, consisting mostly of quads aligned along the edges. The output is mostly quads, although some triangles will appear around intersections.

Game Engine

Lamps and shadows were improved with support for variance shadow maps, shadow color, sun lamp shadows and lamp textures. Non-power of two textures and compressed textures will now load faster and use less memory. A new Character physics type was added, designed for player controlled characters.

composing

A completely new compositing nodes backend was implemented. This new tiled based compositor gives quicker feedback while editing and uses less memory to support working with high resolutions. New nodes were added for bokeh blur, masks and color correction.

color

OpenColorIO is now integrated into Blender, along with a redesign of the color management system. Now many more color spaces are supported with finer control over which color transformations should be used for display, applied on renders, and used for loading and saving image files.

Cycles Render

Cycles now includes a new non-progressive integrator, tiled rendering with support for save buffers, considerably faster BVH building and multithreaded image loading, and motion vector and UV render passes. New nodes are light falloff, object info, particle info and brick texture, and image texture nodes with blended box mapping and image sequences. There is also support for fisheye camera rendering.

Sequencer

Various speed improvements were implemented in the sequencer, for caching and multithreading of effect strips, to make color grading more interactive. Improved options for comparing the current frame to a reference frame are also available.

colada

The Collada exporter has been improved for better support of export to game engines, with more fine grained options to control which data is exported.

More Features

Apart from the major improvements in different areas, there were lots of smaller changes such as improvements in the node editor, smoke simulation, user interface, and new tools for curves and meshes.

Bug fixes

Lots of new features were added in this release, but it also includes lots of fixes for bugs that existed in previous releases.

Blender 2.64 screenshot, click on the image for a larger version.