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Blender 2.70 Test Build is Now Available!

34

Cycles_270_Volume
Image: 'Volume Scatter shader on World Settings ' by Greg Zaal

The Blender Foundation has just released the first test build of the upcoming 2.70 release, and invite you to help test it. Highlights of this release include:

  • Volume rendering and better CPU performance in Cycles
  • Weighted and Plane trackers for the motion tracker
  • TABS! and other interface updates
  • Modifier updates (like the new Laplacian deform modifier, wireframe, screw and bevel)
  • Loading of Photoshop PSD files

Brecht van Lommel writes:

The test build for the upcoming Blender 2.70 release is now available for download.

This is a build for users to test and find issues before we make the final release. If you find bugs, please report them to our bug tracker.

New features include initial support for volumetrics in Cycles, and faster rendering of hair and textures. The motion tracker now supports weighted tracks and has improved planar tracking. For mesh modeling there are new Laplacian deform and wireframe modifiers, along with more control in the bevel tool. The game engine now supports object levels of detail.

The first results from the new user interface project are also in this release, with dozens of changes to make the interface more consistent and powerful. This is also the first release of the multithreaded dependency graph, which makes modifier and constraint evaluation faster in scenes with multiple objects.

For more details, see the (work in progress) release notes for Blender 2.70.

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.

34 Comments

      • I tried to bundle everything you would need to run.
        There seems to be a problem with the 64 bit build running on vista 64 due to an error on my part. That will be fixed in the next development build

    • Szymon Buhajczuk on

      VC2013 means it was compiled with a newer compiler / libraries (Visual C 2013 I guess :P). It has some performance improvements like 15% increase in Cycles speed. The downsides is that it doesn't support windows XP or older operating systems (only Vista/7/8 are supported as far as I know), and also it's very experimental.

      • It is very experimental but it should and does also work on windows XP (only 32 bit).
        And yes for cycles CPU rendering and some other workloads it should be a bit faster.

        More important and a reason to include these builds is that blender is trying to move towards more recent compilers in order to utilize the latest features in modern processors and reduce maintenance burden.

        I really would like feedback on the windows xp vc2013 builds as it was not a trivial undertaking to make them and I am not sure how many xp users we still have.

          • It is a mistake I also made when starting to work on blender Visual Studio 2013 builds.

            I do think that a Visual Studio 2014 or 2015 wont offer a way to build for windows XP.

        • SonlenofBlender on

          I still use XP though I'm thinking I need to upgrade to at least window 7 before fateful April 8. In terms of VC2013 you are saying it is experimental so we should download and bug track it to help out? Also can you help understand why it is experimental if its just using a different compiler wouldn't it be the same?

          • Well I would very much appreciate the testing. I invested time to make the 32 bit build and run on windows XP.

            As for VC2013 builds in general. Microsoft made such an improvement in their support for standards that a lot of the special workaround that exist both in blender and other libraries blender depends on need to be checked and fixed to work correctly with visual studio 2013. I would like blender to switch its default compiler from version 2008 towards a more modern version as soon as possible and more testing and reports will make a responsible switch happen faster.

        • testing Win32 vc2013 version on a Dell dimension 2600 with Win32 xp sp3, vc2008/2010, intel pentium4; so far so good - no crashes - not a cycles user but seems faster. Thanx

        • Well, I tested the 2.70-win64 versus the 2.70-win64-VC2013, just a small scene with a little transparency and glossy surfaces, and the VC2013 was even 22% faster.

          Then I compared it to my old 2.69 official release, 2.69 was still 7% faster than the VC2013 build. So there seems to be no speed improvement - BUT: when you look at the example picture, there is much difference in quality. On the left it's 2.69, on the right is 2.70, and they are both rendered at just 100 samples. Now that's what I call noise reduction improvement...

  1. I know its been around for a little bit (in some builds), but I really think that volumetrics is all that cycles has been missing

  2. woho ! ! ! , cant wait to dig in. got a daily about a month ago. only a few bugs. countin the days for the new release (official).

    • While Cycles does have volumetric rendering now, it is not able to use the smoke simulation data yet. You could set the domain object to use a Cycles volume shader, but it will render the entire domain object as a volume, not the simulated smoke. For that you still have to use Blender Internal.

    • My personal favorite new features:

      1) Walk Mode View Navigation
      2) Box Flood Fill for masking in Sculpt Mode
      3) Multi-Number Button Editing

      I like the major features, but I find it's the little things like these that make me sigh of relief. I sometimes look forward to these more than the major features. :)

      The UI tabs are also growing on me (though, if only the Addons had their own distinct tab...wink, wink!).

  3. Hi,everyone,in the build version,the Rigid Body Tools not have shortcut key,and old version you can press Ctrl +R to add active.
    The build version cell fracture can't load at tool shelf,it's all bug or others? Please fix it, thanks :-)

    • I think the deactivating of CTRL-R is ok because everytime you pressed it during modeling you have a problem without seeing it. I had pressed these keys often enough unintentionally.

      As i would try the new Volume scatter in 2.70 i get only ver noisy results (over 5000 Samples). Please, Mr. Zaal, can you share your Blend-File from the picture above with us ? That would be very nice.

      • I just started learning blender, not test volume scatter, but if
        over 5000 samples still have noise, a little sad .
        When the 3D viewport adjust to small, the vertical tab at the tool shift will be not convenient, hope to improve it,maybe the vertical tab not reduce the area of ​​space and like the header can use MMB to move it down and up.

      • Yes, my volume scatter tests also look very poor. Quite noisy, not much light getting through if the density of the world volume isn't set very low, and then the objects don't throw very impressive shadows into the volumetric light. I'm very far from getting anything like the example picture so the file/settings are very interesting for me as well.

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