Dev:Ref/Release Notes/2.77

Blender 2.77 Release Notes

The Blender Foundation and online developer community are proud to present Blender 2.77!

Download the 2.77 Release

In this release:

• Cycles: Better Subsurface Scattering, GPU support for Smoke/Fire and Point Density.
• Grease pencil stroke sculpting and improved workflow.
• OpenVDB caching for smoke/volumetric simulations.
• Reworked library handling to manage missing and deleted datablocks.
• Redesigned progress bar.
• Edit mode boolean tool, better decimate modifier.
• Improved extruding and weight painting tools for sculpting/painting.
• Support for Windows XP and the SCons build system was removed.
• And: 100s of bug fixes and other improvements!

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Cycles Rendering

Comparison of Subsurface Scattering falloffs.

• Improved Subsurface Scattering, and faster SSS on GPUs.
• Smoke/Fire and Point Density support on GPU.
• Customizable motion blur position, support for rolling shutter.
• Custom baking passes.
• Performance optimizations for large node shaders.
• Improved default settings.

User Interface

• Progress bars got a complete design overhaul.
• Support for multi-line text in tooltips, render stamps, frame nodes and meta data display.
• Better anti-aliasing for OpenGL renders.
• And more!

Modeling

• Decimate modifier is now symmetry aware.
• New Edit-mode boolean tool, useful to quickly perform edits.
• Selection tools got several improvements: face stepping option, checker select, next/previous, multiple axis mirror.
• Option to get a default UV-unwrapping of new geometry.
• And more!

Sculpting/Painting

• Improvements sculpt to snake-hook (rake and pinch/inflate options).
• Better behavior for weight paint auto-normalize option.
• Better behavior for weight paint multi-paint option.

Grease Pencil

• Stroke Sculpting
• A proper "Edit Mode" in the 3D View
• Recoded eraser with pressure sensitivity
• An operator to restrict editing to the active layer only (Isolate Layer)
• Transform Manipulator support
• Animation editing improvements including Copy/Paste and more advanced channel filtering
• ... and many more UI tweaks

More Features

• OpenVDB support for more efficient volumetric caching.
• Better threading handling.
• Cubemap world textures in the 3D view-port.
• Rectangle and ellipse shapes for spotlights.
• OpenSubdiv works on more systems, including AMD APUs and Intel HD 4000+.

Platform/System Changes

• Removed support for Windows XP.
• Blender now uses Python 3.5.1.
• Blender now requires OpenGL 2.1 minimum. We removed dozens of checks and workarounds for older versions of GL.
• Removed the SCons build system. 5d99cde8
• Removed redcode library in favor of using ffmpeg which now supports redcode 9ab74826.
• Blender now bundles the Requests Certificate Authority certificates to enable verification of HTTPS connections in Python 9f8311ee8871b97.

Bug Fixes

As for every Blender release, hundreds of bugs were fixed, thanks to the hardworking Blender developers.

• 2.77a Bugfix Release.