Blender 2.67 Release Notes

The Blender Foundation and online developer community is proud to present Blender 2.67. New in this release is the Freestyle render engine for non-photorealistic rendering, which can generate 2D line drawings in various styles.

The paint and sculpt system is now much more consistent across different paint modes and has gained various new features. Motion tracking was made faster, and Cycles now has initial support for subsurface scattering.

The node system now support more flexible group editing. For developers of external render engine addons it is now possible to support node based materials.

For 3D printing an addon was added to analyze and export the meshes.

Freestyle Line Rendering Engine

Freestyle is a new non-photorealistic (NPR) rendering engine integrated into Blender. Originally developed as a stand-alone program in an academic research project, Freestyle provides artists with a new tool set for generating 2D line drawing out of a given 3D scene prepared with Blender. Generated lines can be stylized by a variety of stylization options for tweaking line color, alpha transparency, line thickness, and line geometry. The resulting line art can be combined with other render components (e.g., render passes from the Blender Internal renderer and Cycles) through render layers and the compositor. Examples of Freestyle use cases include cartoon rendering, architectural visualization, technical drawing, blue prints, and computer-generated sketches. Freestyle expands Blender's rendering capabilities on the basis of geometry-based visualization solutions specifically geared to 2D-like computer graphics.

Paint System Improvements

The stroke system and brush texture access has been unified and as a result there are many more tools now shared across paint modes. Brush angle control, better brush overlays, separate texture control for alpha and a brand new stencil mapping mode with direct mouse control have been implemented. Many improvements and bug fixes have also been made.

Cycles Rendering

A Subsurface Scattering shader is now available, to create materials such as Wax, Marble or Skin. Minimum pixel width was added to hair rendering and several performance improvements have been made, to render scenes without hair or motion blur faster. The OSL shading system received performance improvements as well.

Motion Tracker

Camera and object motion solver motion are much more accurate and faster because the Ceres library is used now for the bundle adjustment step. In addition the tripod solver is finally fixed and has become usable for longer footage. Smaller fixes were done as well.