Development
Since the opening of the source, Blender has experienced significant refactoring of the initial codebase and major additions to its feature set.
Recent improvements include an animation system refresh; a stack-based modifier system; an updated particle system (which can also be used to simulate hair and fur); fluid dynamics; soft-body dynamics; GLSL shaders support in the game engine; advanced UV unwrapping; a fully recoded render pipeline, allowing separate render passes and "render to texture"; node-based material editing and compositing; Projection painting.
Part of these developments were fostered by Google's Summer of Code program, in which the Blender Foundation has participated since 2005.
The current stable release version is 2.64a, the previous version was 2.63a and was released in May 2012. New features included:
- New user interface
- New animation system, which allows almost any value to be animated
- Re-written, Python 3.x scripting API
- Smoke simulation
- Updated toolset, with improved implementation
- Approximate indirect lighting
- Volume rendering
- Ray tracing optimizations, rendering some scenes "up to 10x faster"
- Solidify modifier
- Sculpt brush and stroke upgrade
- Add-on system
- Custom keyboard shortcuts
- Spline IK
- Color management
- Fluid particles (smoothed-particle hydrodynamics)
- Ocean simulation
- Network rendering
- Cycles render engine
- Deep shadow maps
- 3D audio and video
- Game engine navigation meshes
- Motion capture tools
- Collada integration
- Updated motion tracking
- Camera tracking
- New interactive Global Illumination GPU accelerated render engine (Cycles)
The main difference between 2.63 and 2.62 is the introduction of BMesh which allows for n sided polygons (ngons), as opposed to the previous limit of 4 vertices.
Read more about this topic: Blender (software)
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