Blender 2.74 Overview of New Features
Gottfried Hofmann presents a very in-depth overview of new functionality in Blender 2.74 on CG Cookie.
Blender 2.74 is the first Blender release which incorporates major improvements from the Gooseberry Open Movie project. It has received updates to just about every area of Blender, including the viewport, the user interface, Cycles, modeling tools, animation tools, and more.
Over the years I’ve been using blender especially the last couple , I keep thinking this can’t get much better . And every year it’s does. Just watched Hoffman’s overviews and I’ll say it again. WHAT THE #$&% ,, always amazed how you guys do it year after year , but thanks for all the work and time everyone involved in this software. The previews are gonna be really handy the hooks , normal mod data transfer. Well you get it. Great job guy’s and gals.
Not to overlook the great additions and hard work done elsewhere (great work, everyone!), but seeing the Grease Pencil continue towards developing into a promising versatile tool has me quite excited at its progress, and its potential.
The Grease Pencil seems like it’s finally becoming more of the powerful tool it always could’ve been, and its future potential for newer user-guided features is rich. Perhaps the most underrated tool we’ve got in Blender.
We’ve already seen great usage of it, like BSurfaces, and we’re seeing great improvements like Grease Pencil line animation and Surf addon at BlenderArtists (think part-Array Sketch (from Blender 2.5x)/part-Tri Parts Insert Brushes brush from ZBrush, and it’s sorta’ there).
I can imagine drawing Grease-Pencil-guided auto-retopo lines or using Grease-Pencil lines as trajectory paths for animating marked points on a mesh/empty (close to the effect of MotionBuilder’s trajectory-base animation) someday.
Hopefully, curves/edges and Grease Pencil lines can become interchangeable conversions soon, too–I’d love to convert a circle curve/mesh into a perfect-circle Grease Pencil line. So much possibility!
I think it’s also no accident that Maya’s even seen a rather recent addition of a Grease Pencil–I think even Autodesk could see it’s a very useful feature, with versatile potential.
The Surf addon, by the way (a nice development which has the potential to becoming standard in Blender, I’d say):
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?330012-Surf-%28Current-Version-0-76%29