Dev:Ref/Release Notes/2.62/More Features

Blender 2.62: More Features

Changes up to revision 44089. Before editing or adding items, please read the guidelines for editing the changelogs.

Animation

Follow path constraint with a cyclic curve can now loop - r43005
Change how translated unconnected child bones with no inherit rotation are positioned. Now, disabling inherit rotation/scale will no longer move the bone, only affecting its rotation/scale. - r43450
Bake action tool is now available in menus, previously was only available when searching. - r43985
Note that blenders ffmpeg-ff1v ( FFmpeg Video Codec #1 ) codec supports transparency now , which makes a player that support it mandatory for external watching ( based on ffmpeg >= 0.10 )
Export: ffmpeg h264.mov is now compatible with OSX Finder Quickview and Quicktime-Players ( 7.x and X )

Bump and Derivative Maps

16 bit float textures. This feature allows users to load 16 bit per component textures for display in the 3D view when working with float images. This feature is mostly notable when working with the new bump map painting capabilities of blender. To enable the feature, check 16 Bit Float Textures under User Preferences -> System (on by default).

Bicubic bump map filtering in the viewport, for improved bump quality. To use, "best quality" must be set as method for bump mapping under texture options, and the graphics card must support OpenGL 3.0 or later. The filtering helps on close ups of bump mapped surfaces. - r42647

Derivatives maps now are automatically scaled based on object size - r42648

Comparison between high/low res. Right is high bit depth and much smoother. Left is low bit depth and there are artifacts due to the low bit rate of the texture, creating abrupt changes on the derivatives. The higher dynamic range of the float texture allows for greater detail

Color Management

Color Unpremultiply option for images and render settings. For premultiplied alpha images, this makes any color space conversion for the image or render output work on color without alpha multiplied in. This is typically useful to avoid fringing when the image was or will be composited over a light background. If the image will be composited over a black background on the other hand, leaving this option off will give correct results. - r43004
Accelerated sRGB <=> linear conversion using lookup table, this can speed up loading of images in the compositor and simple renders quite a bit. - r43222
Dithering now uses the Floyd-Steinberg algorithm. Previously it would simply randomize each pixel slightly, adding noise, now that should be reduced. - r43222

Dynamic Paint

Added "Project" option also for "Volume + Proximity" brush type. - r43525
Added per surface options "influence scale" and "radius scale" for tweaking brush settings individually for each surface. - r43429
Added option to completely disable drying, useful for indefinitely spreading paint.
Improved paint mixing algorithm.
"Paint effects" now work in relative mesh space instead of global. This means that effect speed remains same for identical shapes regardless of their size.
Improved spread effect algorithm, to avoid artifacts and stopping spreading too early.
Improved dripping algorithm to work better with transparent paint.
Added a new "color dry" setting. It can be used to define wetness level when paint colors start to shift to surface "background". Lower values can be useful to prevent spreading paint from becoming transparent as it dries, while higher (default) values give better results in general.

Note that due to these changes existing files may require some tweaking to match results from previous versions.

Editing

Filled caps of beveled curve

Removing snap points now support removing points other than the last added, Alt+A can be used to select the point. - r42882
Weight painting Vgroup option restored to paint only vertices already in the group, remove unused All Faces option - r43397
Weight preview option for weight editing modifiers, to show the weights generated by the modifier in weight paint mode - r43610
Improved computation of sculpting center and normal - r42683
Added option to fill caps of beveled curves. Works if bevel object is set only - r43852

International Text Editing

Text editor can now edit UTF-8 text - r43427
UTF-8 copy & paste support on X11 and Windows - r43273, r43424

Longer Names and File Paths

Increase file path length limit from 239 to 1023 - r43582
Increase datablock and other names length limit to 63 - r43283

Files with such longer names may have issues loading in Blender versions before January 5, 2011.

Nodes

Double edged mask compositing node added to combine an inner and outer mask into a single feathered mask. - r43265
- Documentation
Removed buttons in node headers for hiding unused sockets and for hiding the (non-socket) option buttons. These operators can still be accessed from the properties panel, and in the Node menu in the node editor. - r42708
Automatically hide unused node sockets in collapsed nodes. - r42726

Outliner

Drag and drop parenting object in outliner - r43601
- Drag and drop is supported for a selection of multiple objects as well. Also, all of the "special" parenting tasks (armature, curve, lattice) are possible through the usual parenting context menus. For example, drag a mesh object onto an armature and you are prompted for using bone envelopes, automatic weights, etc.
- Demo video
Border select tool in outliner - r43504

Physics

Fluid simulation speed control option is back, which means the speed option can be animated to slow down or speed up time. - r43593
Fluid simulation cache reading now has an offset option, to display baked fluid simulation at a different time. - r43822
Cloth: velocity damping option added. This helps avoid "cloth wobbling" problems with animated characters with cloth. - r43627
Baked editing: make particle edit mode more usable for softbodies and cloth - r43588
Fluid particles can now take advantage of multiple processing cores (multithreading). For simulations dominated by SPH calculations (i.e. lots of particles but few collision mesh faces), this results in almost a 4x speed-up on a 4-core machine. If needed, the number of threads can be limited by setting the OMP_NUM_THREADS=n environment variable. - r43069
SPH fluid particles are more stable and symmetrical now. Previously, the limit on the number of neighbouring particles was too low; this resulted in a bias towards one direction. For simulations that used an adaptive time step, the stability improvements also result in a speed-up, as shown below. - r43068

Illustration of the differences in fluid particle behaviour between Blender 2.61 and 2.62. Both simulations have the same settings: 8000 particles over 80 frames with and an adaptive time step threshold of 0.1. Benchmarking: 2.61: 145s; 2.62: 24s - a 6x speed-up due to stability fixes and multithreading. Not all simulations will be sped-up by this much, however.

Render

Quicktime: add more codecs (Animation, Uncompressed, PNG, ..) - r42897, r42900
OpenGL render now uses antialiasing samples setting - r43325
World textures support for equirectangular mapping - r42742

User Interface

Blender with Ubuntu Ambiance theme

Theme presets with 5 themes are in main panel now in User Preferences window r43262, r44086
Running operators now uses last used settings, added reset button to set defaults. - r43308
Number button copy/paste support for units and python expressions - r43574
When splitting editor using right click menu, Tab key can be used to switch the direction - r42744
Search match color in outliner can now be themed - r43599
3D mouse support for USB Spaceball5000 and 3Dconnexion SpaceMouse Pro - r43706, r43518
Quick jump to scroll area with middle mouse clicking on scroll area - r43404, r43420