Download Blender 2.42

The Blender Foundation has just released version 2.42 of the open source and cross-platform 3d developer program Blender. This program is intended 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. The animation film ‘Elephants Dream’ was created with this program and most of the changes in version 2.42 are due to this film project. The release notes can be read as follows:

Since the 2.41 release, we’ve counted almost 3000 commits in CVS. The bug tracker handled over a 1000 reports, of which about half was verified as a bug and fixed.

Listing all of that work, and all fixes, will create a long list that probably nobody wants to read… so here’s the highlights of the smaller new features and most important fixes in CVS.

New features

• Duplicator system was rewritten, now inheriting draw type from parent, and allowing selection on all children.
• Hold SHIFT+MMB in camera view, shifts the viewport around.
• Empty Object type now has 2 choices for drawing, including an option for the scale.
• CTRL+C “Copy Attributes” menu got many more options
• Caching Object transform speedup collision for SoftBody system
• New mouse cursor icons for Paint
• SCon’s build system was rewritten
• Curve Objects now have a “render resolution”, so you can use a lower resolution in 3D window display.
• Image texture mipmapping was extremely slow on large files (5x5k image took 25 seconds), this due to bad filter code. Recode made it 10 times faster, filtering mipmaps now is option in Texture buttons. Without filter it’s 50 times faster.
• Shadow buffers now have filtering options
• Added “Copy Scale” constraint.
• Added “planar” Environment map type, for flat mirrors. Current default is to render the cube side that points to the positive Z axis direction. A new “Zoom” value allows to zoom in or out for better resolution of reflection.
• Soft Body now allows to bake with local coordinates, so you can re-use or further animate the baked object.
• Baking all selected Soft Body: press CTTRL+B in 3d window.
• Curve Objects with bevel, but without front/back or extrude depth, now render as a full circle instead of 2 halves.
• Text Objects default have “filling groups”, to ensure a character that overlaps another doesn’t create a fill conflict. On a ALT+C “Convert to Curve” you now can choose whether or not to keep using this.
• The step size for arrow keys to advance +10 or -10 frames now is a preset (Time Window menu or Scene buttons).
• The 3D window now has a rotating icon to show axis orientation.
• While Weight Painting with an Object in Pose Mode, hotkey key-pad zero now centers on active bone.
• Texture space transform in 3D window (T key) now supports constrained transform.
• The “Re-open Last Saved File” (Ctrl+O) option now stores a history of 10 files.
• Material masking option “Env” now also masks out ZTransp faces.
• Fly mode (SHIFT+F) was redesigned, now works in all three view types – ortho, perspective and camera. The header gives hotkey hints how to use it.
• Added an ‘eyedropper’ tool in the color picker. With the color picker open, you can click on the ‘Sample’ button, to sample any color on the Blender screen. Very useful for compositor, now waiting for a good chroma key node!
• Spherical light probes for AO render now uses filtered samples in the probe image.
• “Transform Properties” Panel now also shows actual dimension of an Object.
• Texture type “Stucci” now returns an intensity value too, useful for previews.
• Outliner now shows driver Objects too.
• Image extensions (when option is chosen) is now used for screen capture and Image Window saving too.
• Weight Paint: new option “Soft” can be disabled, to enable setting weights on vertices in a single click.
• The CTRL+F3 option to make screen captures now works on (pop up) menus. Just press this hotkey twice then. (Note this is ALT+CTRL+F3 on OSX).
• Play option (animation player): press LMB to see which frame is displayed.

Important bug fixes

• Image textures with repeat rendered with completely wrong filter (2.41 bug).
• Replacing SDL thread code with pthread library solved many reported problems. Several cases of not threadsafe code were resolved.
• Nurbs surfaces and Beveled text now have correct “orco” and UV texture coordinates in cyclic cases
• Relative paths for Images in Library files now work
• Vertex/Weight Paint gave corrupted (or crashing) results when painting outside window border.
• AutoSmooth now works well for animated Objects too, using original un-transformed coordinates.
• Maximum limit for render faces went from 8M (quads) to 128M.
• Multiple fixes in filename string handling, for all OS’es. Note: built-in max filename length is still 240 chars.
• Using multiple levels of chained “Set” scenes now works properly.
• Environment map render now survives when its reference Object gets scaled.
• Color Picker popup did not redraw all sliders when used.
• In several Linux distros, the ESC hotkey for exit rendering didn’t work.
• When saving out JPEG images, no alpha is written anymore, was not according to JPEG specifications.
• ALT+A playback kept adding events in queues, causing memory issues (crash) when leaving it play like for a day.
• Rendering Halos was done unsorted, whilst the sorting code was there… now this works again.

Known issues

• The translation system has big problems in deciding what buttons to translate or not, it can also not correctly display file names with special characters.
• Although work has been done it in the past period, Blender’s code is still not full 64 safe. For actual use, it is not recommended to compile a 64 bit Blender yourself. This should become a target for the next release.
• Yafray: for the 2.42 version you need to upgrade Yafray as well.
• Windows: without a TEMP path set in user settings (Info Window) you cannot use the render “Save Buffers” option.
• Render: AO option “Use Distances” does not work for colored AO, only for “Plain”.
• Systems with Intel on-board graphics can expect bad updates in UI for buttons, menus or border selecting.

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