Download Blender 2.66

Version 2.66 of the open source and cross platform 3D program Blender has been released. This application is intended for 3d modelling, 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. Below are the release notes for this release.

Dynamic Topology Sculpting
Dynamic topology is a new sculpting mode that subdivides the mesh as needed, whereas regular sculpting only affects the shape of a mesh. This makes it possible to sculpt complex shapes out of a simple mesh, rather than just adding details onto a modeled base mesh.

UI and Usability
Support for MacBook “Retina” Displays was added, proper DPI scaling in all editors, new high-res icons and transparent tool and property regions. User Preferences and Startup File have been split up, new ways to recover sessions were added and copy & paste of objects inside the 3D View is supported now.

Mesh Modeling
The Bevel tool supports beveling individual vertices in addition to edges now, with one or more segments.

modifiers
New Mesh Cache modifier can apply animation from external files onto a mesh, a new UV Warp modifier can rotate, scale and translate UV maps on a mesh using objects or bones, and the Laplacian smooth modifier now supports shape enhancement.

Particle Fluid Dynamics
A new SPH particle fluid solver was added, designed for more physically accurate results.

Addons
Added MilkShape 3D format support and EDL Video Import.

Rigid Body Simulation
The Bullet physics library has now been integrated into the editor and animation system, which makes rigid body simulations available also outside of the game engine. This results in a much simpler workflow and gives more control over the simulation.

Cycles Render
Initial support for hair rendering was added, with triangle strips, cylinder or bezier curve primitives.

Multiple importance sampling for lamps, preview rendering is available inside the properties editor, new closures and optimizations for OSL, non-progressive integrator was improved and support for packed, generated and movie textures was added.

Image Transparency
The image pipeline has be refactored to handle transparency in images better and compatible to standards. There are two alpha types for images that are useful for different purposes, and we now try to automatically do the right conversions and operations.

Game Engine
The character physics type received a number of new options, profiling and debug information has been cleaned up, and simple shadow maps can now take clipped alpha transparency into account.

colada
Collada import and export was improved for animation: shape keys are now supported, and the armature modifier has been made more stable, respecting axis orientation and scene scaling.

More Features
New features include vertex color baking, more efficient ambient occlusion baking for multires meshes, edge based UV stitching, more control over mapping texture brushes for texture painting, gradient tools for weight painting, and a translate node for the compositor.

Bug fixes
In addition to the new features, over 250 bugs that existed in previous releases have been fixed.