Blender 2.74 Out Now, Available for Mac OSX, Windows, Linux Ubuntu and Linux Mint [PPA]

Blender 2.74 Out Now with New Tools, Add-Ons, and Dozens of Improvements

The Blender Foundation is proud to announce today, March 31, the immediate availability for download of the Blender 2.74 free, open-source 3D modelling software that is used by many professional designers to create stunning graphics and models for Hollywood movies.

Highlights of Blender 2.74 include Cycles Render improvements, support for Custom Normals, new Viewport features, an all-new “Cavity Mask” tool, several improvements to the Game engine and Grease pencil, a number of improvements to the hair dynamics and editing tools, as well as great memory consumption optimizations in Freestyle NPR stroke rendering.

In detail, we can mention that the Cycles Render component received several memory, noise, speed, and precision improvements, as well as a brand-new Pointiness attribute for the Geometry node, which can be used to control texture space of a single object by another.

Supports a wide range of image file types, animations and movies

Blender allows for photorealistic rendering, fast modelling, fast rigging, sculpting, fast UV unwrapping, amazing simulations, camera and object tracking, and much more. The application provides import and export support for various image file types, such as JPEG, JPEG2000, PNG, TIFF, TAGA, DPX, Radiance HDR, SGI Iris, Cineon, and OpenEXR. In addition, it can import or export animations and movies to MPEG, AVI and Quicktime file formats, and 3D models for 3D Studio (3DS), X3D, STL, Autodesk (DXF), DirectX (x), Motion Capture (BVH), Lightwave (LWO), SVG, Filmbox (FBX), Stanford PLY, Wavefront (OBJ), VRML, VRML97, and COLLADA (DAE).




What is Blender ?

Blender is an open source application for creating professional 2D/3D graphics, models and animation on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. The truth is that Blender is targeted at advanced users and enthusiasts who know what they are doing. However, new users can find comprehensive documentation and tutorials on the official website, which will help them to get started with Blender.

What’s new in Blender 2.74:

• Cycles got a few optimizations, a new “Pointiness” attribute and objects can now use the texture maps from other objects, the Viewport is now able to display Ambient Occlusion and Depth of Field, the Outliner was improved in quite some ways, it is now possible to edit normals, the Hair tools developed for the Gooseberry Project are now available (including improved hair dynamics, child hair modifiers and various interaction tools), texture painting can now be done using Cavity Masks, Freestyle memory consumption was greatly improved, the Grease Pencil rewrite from Blender 2.73 was continued to make more editing tools available, improvements for animation interaction and many more features which are worth checking out!