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Blender 2.61 Released

94

The Blender Foundation has just released a brand new Blender 2.61!

From the announcement:

The Blender Foundation and online developer community is proud to present Blender 2.61. The 2.6x series is being targeted at including all work that happened in branches or patches past years.

Most notable in this release is the new render engine Cycles, the Camera Tracker, Ocean Simulation texture and Dynamic Paint. Check the releaselog for detailed information.

Link

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

94 Comments

  1. What is very remarkable is that - in contrast to other open source and commercial software - the Blender team really manages to keep the bimonthly release cycle.

    What's even more remarkable is that these releases don't only bring bugfixes, but new unbelievable features that commercial software will only turn out once a year or every two years - but for a nice update fee you have to pay.

    In Short: Blender team, I can't believe this really happens, sometimes I think it's a dream and some day I will be woken up in front of my PC, by a popping out Maya message window that says: Update and pay now or Maya will deny service!

    I love you guys!

    • I agree that the blender team is top. But the comparison to commercial software is a bit unfair. The features in Blender are
      popping up all the time in the 2.6 series, because the goal of the 2.6 series is to merge every cool feature that has been developed in the last years and that will be useful for Mango. These are branches developed by random volunteers that needed the feature themselves, or through GSoC internships.

      Still, the rate at which the guys are merging these branches is nothing but amazing!

    • Kirill Poltavets on

      Bogey's build will help you. Actually 1.1 doesn't support transparent shadows. I'm going to buy a new 3d card... MB and CPU too.

  2. Hey, Bart, I totally checked BlenderNation to see if the awesomeness had been released, then checked blender.org and got 2.61 downloaded (and installed!) before you posted the fantastic news! :D

    I guess it's a sixth sense of mine ... new release of Blender... :P

    • Worst release ever - but only because of the download speed!

      I've never before actually gotten coffee, come back and had it still chugging along...

      But then again, there was only one release candidate (presumably meaning the devs were just a little bit awesomer than usual this time around), so no complaints about the wait!

  3. All I can say is "Thank You" to the devs and, of course, to Ton. (Come on, everybody! Let's not forget the man who made all this possible!)

  4. This is by far the most exciting Blender release ever (with the possible exception of Blender 2.57)! Great job developers!

  5. I think its amazing when a piece of open source software take this long to download because of the sheer amount of people rushing to download it at the same time around the world... Like wow... As for this most recent release. Its amazing how far BF has come since I started to use it, and learn it. 

    Whats more amazing is that I am sure my old boss from my last job is going to be quite upset realizing he upgraded to Max 2012 only to find that it still crashes 20+ times a day... Ugh I told him... Then again I would be mad too if I spent thousands of dollars on software that was buggy, when Blender Foundation releases things like this quite often. And to think when I was working there and using blender in a professional production environment it never crashed... not once...

    So yet again thank you Blender Foundation and Ton, and all the other supporters.

    xnL

  6. A big thank you to all the people involved with Blender and to the whole and one of the best communities on web and last but not least thank you DEVELOPERS for making us so happy with each new release!!!

  7. Thanks a lot, Blender Foundation. My only gripe is that I still can't pan while using my 3D mouse and it's been like this since version 2.59. I hope this gets fixed sometime in the near future.

  8. This is way to awesome!  This is the version I've been waiting for.  Cycles, Ocean sim, camera tracking, and dynamic paint. It's almost to good to be true!

    Thanks Blender team so much for all the hard work!  I'm really looking forward to putting this release to good use!

    P.S.  Does anyone know if there will be a 64 bit download for OS X?

  9. This is a wonderful classy update. I'd like to echo Lactose's comment regarding panning for the 3d mouse - that would be the cherry on top when that is resolved in time.

  10. Srujanraghavendra on

    Hello Bart, I'm standing in q since last night to grab the new born 2.61! i kept on logging in to blendernation and foreverblender websites for the breaking news. But when i finally went to blender.org to download i couldnt see 2.61 at all. I even now see only 2.60a version only. could you please tell me what might be the problem?

  11. Could anyone upload it to some host? Win version 64 and 32 bits or what ever, would be nice...Can't even get in the webpage

    Thanks blenderheads!

  12. From one of the toughest interface to start-with to the most convenient workspace in any 3D content creation software, it has been a amazing journey. With committed and feature-loaded 2.61 released, we can officially claim that Blender is the eighth wonder of the world.

  13. Fortunately, the blender.org site is available again.
    So you can download it in the traditional way, and browse the log message. (I have already tested the RC1, and this first version of Cycles is already very impressive! Tremendous piece of work!)

  14. And even better, Cycles has got much faster on my PC since 2.60a. Don't know why, perhaps 2.61 is now using my rubbish old ATi Radeon HD3470 card (probably not), or Cycles has been 'optimized' some more...
     
    2.60a, 100 preview render cycles (in 3D window): 1:48
    2.61,  100 preview render cycles (in 3D window): 0:24
     
    2.60a, 100 proper render cycles: 2:15
    2.61,  100 proper render cycles: 0:26

    Is there any way to work out for sure if my puny graphics card is actually being used by Cycles (or not)?

    • It does seem very fast compared to the preview releases.  Especially once I realized that I didn't even have GPU rendering turned on. :-) Right now there are several people at Autodesk who need to change their underwear.

  15. I think there is BIG BUG in traslations (lunux ubuntu 11.04). It does not work (only chinesse). if you make chage to chinesse then you can get any traslation. But the real problem is that it does not save the preference (File/Save user preferences...)

  16. Anyone else having big problems with sculpting using alphas? They are causing all kinds of artifacts for me, especially in anchored drag mode, and the alphas affect only the very edges of my brush radius. Also, they seems to have a plane falloff even though I have limit plane turned off.

  17. Got it! Nice and shiny!
    The only disappointment is (traditionally) the splash screen (only after a while did I realise what it shows). Weird.
    Other than that, the current version is amazing!

  18. Jean-Gabriel LOQUET on

    Hurray :) !! It's Xmas already ;) !!

    Thanks and congrats to the Blender devs for this new HUGE stable release :) it's the best Xmas gift I could have hoped for.

    Cycles looks really promising and cam tracking nicely complements the Blender arsenal for vfx and postprod.

    Now a feature allowing to bake Cycles GI render to textures would be a huge plus to create realistic game environments 
    and 3D video background plates. :)

    Keep on rockin' !

    Cheers, 
    ______
    JG

  19. hello! 
    Since it is Christmas, could everyone who develop software provide lib files too? sometimes it is a real pain to go and look for what is missing in your linux. For example SK1 Project developers made a very nice gesture by providing 3 archives, two for needed librarys and one for application. I don't know if it is supposed to be like this, but well I have a fresh install of Linux and downloaded the brand new blender with Cycles. it wont launch because of missing library. It is really easy for a new Linux guy to make things go wrong via terminal.... It would make a lot new comers to Linux be a lot happier if this would be addressed, 

    Anyway thank you for the fantastic Blender 2.61 

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