Dev:Ref/Release Notes/2.78

Blender 2.78 Release Notes

The Blender Foundation and online developer community are proud to present Blender 2.78!

Download the 2.78 Release

In this release:

• Cycles: Cycles now supports rendering spherical stereo images for VR.
• Grease Pencil: Reworked to be similar to other 2D drawing softwares.
• Alembic: Initial basic support in Blender.
• Improvements to Bendy Bones for Easier and Simpler Rigging.
• Eleven new add-ons.
• And: 100s of bug fixes and other improvements!

2.78b Performance release

This is a 2.78a release-compatible update with important speedups, especially in Cycles and for Dependency graph.

2.78c release

Unfortunately small errors crept in the binaries, to not confuse users we rebuilt it and make it available as 'c'. Click the link above for the changelog.

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Grease Pencil

• New design and complete overhaul, including:
• Easy layer management.
• Ability to have multiple colors and thickness values per layer.
• Stroke quality improvements.
• Different color saturation in the same stroke.
• Improved Fills - Support for Concave Shapes.
• Parenting a layer to any object, armature or bone.
• And more!

For Addon developers: See related Grease Pencil API Changes

Alembic

• Initial implementation in Blender.
• Basic Alembic support through import and export operators.
• Data streaming through cache constraints and modifiers.

Cycles Renderer

• Rendering spherical stereo images for VR is now supported.
• Multiscatter GGX mode for the glossy and glass BSDF nodes.
• Experimental feature: Improved Subdivision and Displacement system.
• Vertex color, weight and normal support for point density textures.
• Hair rendering speed up / memory use improvements.
• OpenCL devices now support float4 textures (e.g. HDR textures).
• Added support for NVidia GTX 1060, 1070, 1080 GPUs.

User Interface

• Improvements to the Eyedropper and Operator Search.
• Additional drawing mode for the Waveform Scope in the Image Editor.
• Defining ranges and individual render frames in the Command Line.

Modeling

Fill Region Selection

• New Freehand Curve drawing tool.
• New Dissolve tool.
• New Fill Region tool for Selection.
• Improvements to Decimation, Bevel.
• Edit-mode undo memory usage has been optimized.

Viewport & Render

• More supported shading nodes and options for the Cycles viewport render.
• Additional shading features for the Blender GLSL viewport.
• Blender Render shading can now also be computed in world space.

Animation

• Improvements to Bendy Bones for Easier and Simpler Rigging.
• Numerous changes to streamline the process of setting up and editing drivers.
• The type of keyframe can be chosen on insertion.
• Support non-uniform scaled bones failing with IK solver.
• And more!

Datablocks & Libraries Management

• A new core low-level feature for datablocks management, called 'ID remapping'.
• Currently it allows from the Outliner:
  • In the Blender File view to Reload and Relocate libraries.
  • In All Scenes, Current Scene and similar views to Fully Delete or Remap a datablock.

Physics

• The rest shape of cloth can now be animated.
• Cloth Simulation Speed is now adjustable.
• Collision Groups for Particles and Soft Body.

Python API and Add-ons

• 11 new add-ons are included in this release.
• Numerous improvements and fixes to existing add-ons.
• Removed Import: MakeHuman (.mhx) (format not supported anymore in MakeHuman).
• New Preferences Individual Activation.
• Changes to the Python API functions.
• And more!

Bug Fixes

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