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Blender 2.69


Roland Taylor's Gravatar

Roland Taylor
published Nov. 1, 2013, 6:07 p.m.


Blender 2.69 was released yesterday, bringing numerous improvements and relatively few (user facing) new features.

This new release comes not long after the 2.68 release, which brought a minor of a milestone in the form of Cycles Toon Shading. This release (2.69), won't likely blow you away with its short list of new features and improvements, but there are some which should impress none the less. These include:

  • Plane Tracking

    This motion tracking feature will help users to place items such as billboards and photographs in their scenes.

  • Cycles Improvements

    There are so many improvements in Cycles this release, I don't really know where to start. The feature that most jumps out at me is the Blackbody Node, which will allow your lights to get their colour from the their temperature! If that doesn't blow you away, I don't know what will. You will also find various improvements to Sub-Surface Scattering (SSS), including bump mapping support.
    For the full list of improvements in Cycles, see here.

  • Modelling improvements:

    Modelling is one of the areas where Blender really shines, in my humble opinion, and this release kicks things up another notch, even if that notch is not exactly mind blowing. Because the list is so long for this one, I'll refer you to the release notes.

  • And there is more!

    To round things off, you have features such as viewport roll, resizable property lists, and vertex parenting in object mode!
    See here for more.

Where do I get it?

There are two recommended ways to grab yourself some Blender goodness. The first is to grab a tarball from the official download page.

The second is to use the Irie PPA:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:irie/blender
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install blender

Please not that I've occasionally had problems with Blender when using this PPA, but the bug seems to be in glibc and not Blender itself. I am still investigating the precise cause of the issue.