Blender 2.67 released

[Bullit]

http://www.blender.org/development/rele ... ender-267/

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.

Detailed:

Freestyle

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.

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.

3D Printing

An addon to help with 3d printing is now bundled as well as a new ruler tool and mesh-analysis display attributes such as thickness, sharp-areas and distortion.

Cycles Render

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.
Addons

New addons are the node efficiency tools and VRML2 export.

Bug fixes

In addition to the new features, over 260 bugs that existed in previous releases have been fixed.

Paint System

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.

Compositing

Added border for compositor viewer node, which restricts what is to be composited for faster previews. Also border rendering and cropping are finally working as expected. Some optimization was done as well.

Node Editor

Node Groups editing is less cluttered and more consistent with other nodes. Multiple node editor windows can be used independently. Nesting node groups is fully supported. Pinning is supported as well in the node editor to disable context switching.

Python Nodes

The API now supports custom node types. Nodes can be defined and registered in python scripts like other UI classes. This allows the creation of entire new node systems for addons, external render engines and the like.

Tools

New mesh modeling tools: Individual Face Inset, Poke Face and Knife Project. Faster image display in the image and movie clip editors. Better support for UTF-8 text in the text and console editors, and various improvements to other editors.

[Nizar]

Blender is a really nice alternative. I can speak only for my job (I modelling characters for prototyping little statue and doing some rendering for illustration and archiviz), IMHO some TD will feel a little restricted coming from Softimage. Howerver rigging is very fast and in animation ( I doing very simple animation) some expert animator can feel the lack of layers.

In these release they add some instrument for 3d printing, really nice.

For my purpose, blender need only a better viewport performance (but is a know issue, they have a project for revamp viewport). Also, after a bit of struggle I understood the workflow and logic inside the software, IMHO softimage is more fast, but blender workflow is not bad at all (from my experience is better then 3dsm or maya workflow). Need only to customize a bit it (select under left mouse button, confirm on release and others little things like keymapping)

Resources and tutorials are everywhere (the major parts are really basic and amateurish)

[pluMmet]

I just wish they would integrate bSurfaces 1.5 already... with each new Blender release I have to wait and then I never realize that it has been updated for that release until there is yet another release

[Nizar]

bsurface is just integrated (from 2.63 release), in user preference (file>userpreferece) select "addon" tab, in search write bsurface and select it.

[pluMmet]

bSurfaces has been in for a lot longer then that but AFAIK not 1.5... I wish you were right but the latest bSurfaces 1.5 is for Blender 2.65c

[Nizar]

I don't know,don't use it. However In ADDON tab are reported Ver. 1.5

[Hirazi Blue]

Well, the integration of the NPR system Freestyle would ALMOST tempt me to give Blender yet another go, although its inclusion in Blender just proves a point I have made on earlier occasions: Blender is the Autodesk of the open source 3D world, as it gobbles up all interesting development in that field.
;)

[Nizar]

Not agree, Blender is not the AD of open source, blender is the only serious 3d open source project. The other software is wings 3d, but by developers admission wings will have not any major update.

Freestyle was developed by and for blender, and blender/freestyle merge was a precise request by the freestyle creator.

You must give a serious try to blender, if I can give an advice, Insideout tutorial and Car tutorial in blender foundation eshop are very nice to understood blender workflow. Also, any Kent Trentmal tutorial from CGcookie (especial the first one, portrait tutorial) and Blender Guru tutorial for compositor and render are very valid.

[Nizar]

Released 2.67a
Also, I found this script: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Exten ... play_Tools
This resolve (not totally) the lack in viewport performance. Is not a real solution, but a nice work around.

[Ramon]

I think the main problem of blender is not working addons and plugins between old versions and newest (not for all) You working with many scripts and plugins and some day want to update but your hotkeys, preferences and plugins not work. And guys who wrote don`t update its.

[Nizar]

I using few addon in blender, the major part of it are just build into blender and need only to be activated. So, this is costantly update directly by blender foundation. I start using blender more extensively only in this days, and day after day I found it a valid solution for my need.

[iamVFX]

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:R ... thon_Nodes

[Bullit]

Excellent! ICE for Blender. If the mismanagement of Autodesk Media& Entertainment continues the alternatives are getting better and develop faster every day.
Realflow already have a sort of ICE too.

[Nizar]

http://code.blender.org/index.php/2013/ ... nd-beyond/

This is the Blender Foundation road map for the next years. I bet they'll realize every point

Actually I force myself to use only blender (and in my last jobs I don't need the other features XSI has) and I'm pretty happy and impressed by speed, quality and quantity of features blender has.