Major improvements to the Viewport and Grease Pencil are just two promised highlights.īlender 2.79 is available now as a free, open-source download for Windows, Mac and Linux. The release follows on the news that the next big release - Blender 2.8 - is expected next year.

The update is also rounded off by the usual vast number of fully documented bug fixes. Reorganized sequencer and UV editor panels and custom shortcuts for keyframing and drivers have also been added.Ī full set of feature highlights are available at the website.

The user interface has been enhanced too, with automatic scaling for high DPI displays on Linux. Video encoding settings have been simplified, along with the addition of a CRF mode. The Animation Pose library allows the selection and reordering of key bones only, and is accompanied by a few new tools and options. There’s a new surface deform modifier for the Mesh Modeling tool, allowing users to easily transform motion from another mesh. The Grease Pencil tool also gains per-layer onion skinning, an add blank frame tool and UI improvements.Īlembic import and export is now more stable and compatible, and widens its export features to include linked dupli-groups, child hairs and empties. The cycles renderer also works better on AMD OpenCL hardware, which gains feature parity with NVIDIA CUDA-powered devices.Įlsewhere, there are new tools for interpolating between grease pencil frames, including interpolate and sequence operators. There’s also filmic color management to handle HDR better. Version 2.79, also available in 64-bit and portable form on Windows, opens with several improvements into its Cycles Rendering feature.įirst, denoising is now built in, and is joined by a Principled BSDF shader to render a wide range of different materials.Īlso added is a shadow catcher tool to make it possible to composite CGI elements into real-world footage.

Blender 2.79 portable download