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Blender 2.64 Released

61

The Blender Foundation has just released Blender 2.64. This is the release that contains all the new functionality that was required to make Tears of Steel. The most important changes were improvements to the motion tracker, and better masking/green screen keying tools. But that's not all - Blender Game Engine users will be happy to know that this part of Blender got some upgrades, too!

Ton Roosendaal writes:

The Blender Foundation and online developer community is proud to present Blender 2.64. This release was targeted at improving Blender for the Mango open movie project, along with integrating branches and patches from the past years.

The focus was on creating a full VFX pipeline, with improved motion tracking using a planar tracker, easier green screen keying, and a new mask editor. A new tile based compositing system was added, along with more advanced color management. Cycles rendering got dozens of smaller features and improvements resulting from its use in production.

Sculpting now supports masks, and a skin modifier was added to quickly create a model from skeletons. The game engine got improved shadows and physics options, and Collada export now has more options to tune for exporting to other game engines.

Check the list below for highlights and the full changelog.

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.

61 Comments

  1. I'm pretty excited about ANY improvements to the BGE. I love it when they do the foundation projects because huge improvements get rolled in with real world experience as the testing ground.

      • unrealanimation3d on

        Yeah, this is a great improvement ive been waiting all year for a bge upgrade.
        I would like to see bge updates in the future though.
        it never seems to get any love.

        They should deff add a real time particle system and liquid system for blender ge.
        It would be just extremely passed awsome to see features like what we see in Unreal Engine being added to Blender Game Engine.
        Then making rain and fair would be way easier maybe even sparks.
        all they would really have to do is implement there render option like that Bge add on particle system.
        but those are very out dated and can only be used in one scene period.

        So id definitely like to see this Genius make a Bge particle system implemented into blender. Its time for the Bge to open its doors to the future.

        i hope the developers make that push.

  2. Guys, check out Cycles speed with this release. In a few tests I've had 2 times shorter render times prior to Blender 2.63a. Amazing! :-) Thanks for all your hard work, Blender Team!!!

  3. Thank you, Blender Team!
    About two years passed I'm using Blender as my primary 3d program.
    And since that I wasn't really dissapointed even a single time! All changes were necessary and now we have a very powerful and continuously expanding professional program for many aims!

  4. Seems like the Blender server is being hammered with DL requests. Downloading Blender at less than 15KB/s. But that's probably a good indicator of the popularity :D

  5. So many improvements come with just a little giant problem: cycles render time takes a LOT of time to render a simple scene. The deafault sceane works fine, but just add some material or walls and the render preview turns useless (and dangerous, because some times blender stops to respond for a few seconds);

    I've notice speed increase 10 to times (compared to 2.63), to render a simple room with suzzane with mix shader material. I have fear to explode my computer testing some more complicated. I just can't use cycles on a professional jobs anymore until it be fix.

    • @samuelsantos: I don't understand. First you say that the render times are very long, than you say that new Cycles is up to 10 times faster than 2.63. So, how is it?

      Preview render will always take some time with complicated scenes. You could tweak it a bit, though. You could decrease preview samples or change Light Paths -> Integrator Presets to Direct Light.

      Also, if you want to check just part of the image - in camera view (numpad 0) hit Shift+B to select Border Render. It will render just the part of the image = faster that rendering all.

      • @mallow

        What he's saying is that he has seen an increase in render speeds for simple scenes but there is major instability in complicated scenes.

        I agree with him since I'm experiencing the same issues.

        • Sadly, after few more tests I have to agree with you :-/ Generally, Cycles from 2.64 seems slower than 2.63a when I set render tiles to 1x1 (as 2.63a had no cycles tiles at all). When I set tiles to deafult 8x8, 2.64 is faster, but just a bit. Here are my results:

          2.63a no tiles: 01:14.97
          2.64 1x1 tiles: 02:19.87
          2.64 8x8 tiles: 01:11.64
          2.64 8x8 tiles use spatial splits: 01:14.84

          I have to check render times with this test scene:
          http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?239480-2-61-Cycles-render-benchmark
          I will post results later.

          • Sorry, i'm brazilian, and i can do mistakes with some words. But, 1X1 tiles is important to me, because is the way i confirm how many passes I need do render a sceane. And the preview is a way to get some issues before render or see something cool by accident.

          • I did the tests... and:

            8x8 tiles - 4:57:71
            1x1 tiles - 22:38:74 (!)
            16x16 tiles - 05:03:42

          • That's really odd, 1x1 tiles give me faster renders while more tiles give slower renders.

            Fyi, I have an nvidia 560 ti...

          • It seems that with Blender 2.64 rendering with 1x1 tiles uses only one core of your processor. That's why you get such longer render times with 1x1 tiles comparing to 8x8 tiles or higher. I have a dual core processor and render times with 1x1 tiles take 2 times longer that with 2.63a.
            I've posted this to bugtracker:
            http://projects.blender.org/tracker/?func=detail&atid=498&aid=32782&group_id=9
            but it wasn't considered as a bug. It only got moved to todo list. I don't know when this will be resolved :-(

  6. What happened to "Sticky" Texture mapping? Am I missing it? Moved. Deleted? I use it a lot for camera mapping photos...

  7. I've recently started to employ hard surface sculpting techniques from this training series: http://eat3d.com/zbrush_hardsurface2

    Even though it's for zbrush, I find it a lot easier and faster to do everything within Blender. Although, there is a huge amount of instability (most annoying of which is poping) with all of the sculpting tools and I hope some major improvements are made to the remesh modifier so that concept sculpting can be made much easier.

    Nevertheless, thank you devs for another fine release!

  8. Congratulations to all the team !!!
    this 2.64 version is better than a 3.0 version ;)
    Now waiting the object-motion blur cycles and the real-time displacement feature fully working to use cycles as the most powerfull rendering engine !!

  9. My wife asked me what I wanted for my birthday in a few days' time.
    I said I couldn't think of anything. Shall I just be honest and tell her that I downloaded a major new release of Blender, so I don't really care what she buys me?

  10. Keep an eye out for the 'untitled screen' or '3d view full' in the screen option list. Once selected, I couldn't see an easy escape without restarting

      • Thanks. Ctrl + arrow does return a header, but the header is minus the screen type selector or editor selector button.

        I have seen a Blender Artists post on the issue involving tinkering with the data blocks, but out of caution, I will just beware :)

        I'm sure it will get seen to at some point.

        • Ctrl+up/down is actually not too useful, you're right, because back to previous just gets back to 3D view full. But with Ctrl+left/right you can cycle through the screens and from there you can get back to any screen you want.

          • Thanks, Sanne. I'm using OSX Snow Leopard, so needed to reconfigure the Ctrl+l/R that the OS workspaces were using. Ctrl+L/R to cycle the Blender screen works fine now. The 3D full view is actually very useful.

    • If you look carefully you will see the small + (plus sign) at the bottom edge of the window. If you click and drag that it will reveal the header. You can also click and drag on the very top right corner to split the window, etc.

  11. Looking forward to having a play around with the skin modifier, looks like it could be great fun for coming up with a few character ideas. Thanks for another great release.

  12. nice release , would be great to see some bge devoloping in next few realeas see that indie game can very much use something like improve rendering features and maybe some extense gamelogic tools pathfind and A.I. and maybe android export of the game and more publishing option like unity 3d

  13. And the PLAY button is BACK! To me this is one big feature i has waiting for a long time (since blender's new UI).

  14. Awesome! While I've been using features of 2.64 (from the Arch Linux repos) for awhile now, the upgrade to the official makes Cycles renders waaay faster (and cleaner). Nice work overall, love the Skin modifier for sculpting (it truly is amazing).

  15. wow, I am so excite every time new release of Blender.
    I see the Blender still growing. better and more better improvement.
    I am waiting for Android Tablet Blender.
    Are the Blender Foundation building software for Android Tablet near future?
    I believe somebody wanna it , me too
    Thanks!!

    • Nicholas Rishel on

      Android compatability by Alexandr Kuznetsov and Multitouch support by myself were projects during this Google Summer of Code. I believe Alex has examples of getting parts of the entire package working on Android, I will be returning to work on this in the next week or so.

  16. Hi, I didn't manage to install the new release for windows 7 - 64 bits. It gives a run error and fails to open. Someone else experinced this?

    • Yeah I can't run 2.64 on my window 7 64 bits either. I get an error that the application have requested the runtime to close it in an unusual way. The console says it's unable to load the file system codec.

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