thanks to nia and joerg for help with updating.
see https://www.blender.org/download/releases/ for a full list
of changes. vague summary includes:
2.91:
The fourth major release in 2020 is here to further improve the
user experience, adding powerful new booleans, better cloth
sculpting with support for collisions, volume objects modifiers,
improved animation tools and so much more.
Introducing collision support for the sculpt cloth brush and
filter.
The new Sculpt Trim tool lets you cut and even add geometry using
box or lasso gestures.
This brush includes a set of deformation modes designed to control
the shape of the mesh boundaries.
The new Simulation Target property allows the Pose and Boundary
brushes to simulate cloth effects as you use them.
Introducing the Exact solver to take care of complex geometry.
Curve and text objects now have support for custom bevel profiles,
just like the bevel modifier.
All bevel types now support flat curve caps too!
A new modifier for volume objects allows you to dynamically
convert them into a mesh, ideal for stylized fluids.
Convert any mesh into a volume and combine it with the new Volume
Displace modifier.
Convert images into Grease Pencil objects with just one click!
The new Holdout option in materials allows you to paint holes in
strokes and filled areas.
Can't remember where that setting is? Search for it!
Sloppy typing? Don't worry! Fuzzy search makes it so you can be
less precise and still find what you look for.
The new support for Compound Shape collisions allow for complex
simulations not possible before.
You now can combine multiple primitive shapes into a concave
shape, resulting in blazing fast simulations.
Everywhere! Tag your collections with colors.
Drag & drop now works for modifiers, constraints and Grease Pencil
effects.
Animation curves can now become much snappier, allowing for more
sudden changes with fewer keyframes required.
2.92:
A completely new workflow for editing meshes, new physics
simulation methods, faster Cycles rendering, better compositing
with Eevee, and so much more. Blender 2.92 marks the beginning of
something incredible.
The new Geometry Nodes editor opens the door for creating and
manipulating meshes using a node-based system.
Create your own custom modifier! Expose properties from the nodes
in the modifier stack for an easy-to-use interface.
This first iteration focuses on object scattering and instancing,
laying the groundwork for more advanced workflows in the upcoming
releases.
Smear multires displacement over the limit surface similar to how
smearing for colors and topology slide works.
Shape silhouettes as you please with this new option in the Grab
tool.
Mesh Fairing allows you to visually remove parts of your mesh by
completely smoothing the area inside a Face Set.
Grease Pencil strokes can now be edited as curves!
The Trace Image feature now supports image sequences!
Grease Pencil interpolation has been improved to better deal with
different sized strokes.
Volume rendering is significantly more memory efficient, by using
a sparse NanoVDB grid.
OptiX now supports hybrid rendering to combine the power of your
CPU and GPU devices.
See everything with the new Exposure node in the Compositor.
2.93:
A total of 22 new nodes were added to the Geometry Nodes editor
expanding the attribute system, sampling textures, support for
volume data, improved usablity, mesh primitives, Cycles support
for attributes, and much more.
It is now possible to create mesh circles, cones, cubes,
cylinders, grids, ico-spheres, uv-spheres, and lines without ever
leaving the Geometry Nodes editor.
Geometry Nodes allows you to create the most flexible modifiers.
For this releases' splash, the author Erindale went all-in and
made the entire thing pretty much using only Geometry Nodes.
It has never been easier to create, tweak, and expand Masks or
Face sets as you sculpt.
Splitting complex figures into multiple objects is a quick way to
significantly improve performance. In order to ease this workflow,
there is a new way to quickly jump between objects while in Sculpt
mode.
The Line Art modifier generates stylized lines on your scene,
collections, or individual objects.
The Interpolate operator is now a full-fledged tool!
The new Eevee looks so good you may want to re-render all your
projects.
The new Depth of Field handles close-ups and outlines much better.
Volume shaders in Eevee now support Area Lights and Soft Shadows.
Changelog:
Building on the success of the 2.8 series, Blender 2.90 continues
to polish the user experience, introducing improvements to EEVEE,
Cycles, sculpt, VR, animation, modeling, UV editing and so much
more. Blender integrates industry standard libraries such as Intel
Embree, Intel OpenImageDenoise and NVidia Optix to provide a
cutting-edge rendering experience.
Changelog:
With over 1250 bugfixes, and further critical fixes due throughout
the next two years as part of the Long Term Support program, Blender
2.83 LTS provides the performance and stability needed for major
projects. New features include VR support, OpenVDB import, OptiX
viewport denoising and a powerful new physics-enabled Cloth Brush.
GCC 9 started implementing the OpenMP 4.0 and later behavior. When not using
default clause or when using default(shared), this makes no difference, but
if using default(none), previously the choice was not specify the const
qualified variables on the construct at all, or specify in firstprivate
clause. In GCC 9 as well as for OpenMP 4.0 compliance, those variables need
to be specified on constructs in which they are used, either in shared or
in firstprivate clause. Specifying them in firstprivate clause is one way to
achieve compatibility with both older GCC versions and GCC 9,
another option is to drop the default(none) clause.
This patch thus drops the default(none) clause.
See https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-9/porting_to.html#ompdatasharing
patch from fedora.
* Fix startup
Changelog:
2.79
In this release:
Cycles: Built-in Denoising, Shadow catcher, Principled shader, AMD OpenCL optimizations.
Grease Pencil: New frame interpolation tools, per-layer onion skinning.
Alembic: Improvements to compatibility, stability and support.
User Interface: Initial support for reusable custom configurations, automatic DPI scaling.
Twenty Three new and several updated add-ons.
And: 100s of bug fixes and other improvements!
2.78
In this release:
Cycles: Cycles now supports rendering spherical stereo images for VR.
Grease Pencil: Reworked to be similar to other 2D drawing softwares.
Alembic: Initial basic support in Blender.
Improvements to Bendy Bones for Easier and Simpler Rigging.
Eleven new add-ons.
And: 100s of bug fixes and other improvements!
* Convert to cmake build from scons
Changelog:
In this release:
Cycles: Better Subsurface Scattering, GPU support for Smoke/Fire and Point Density.
Grease pencil stroke sculpting and improved workflow.
OpenVDB caching for smoke/volumetric simulations.
Reworked library handling to manage missing and deleted datablocks.
Redesigned progress bar.
Edit mode boolean tool, better decimate modifier.
Improved extruding and weight painting tools for sculpting/painting.
Support for Windows XP and the SCons build system was removed.
And: 100s of bug fixes and other improvements!
Fixes build with python35 (PR pkg/50566)
Blender 2.76, released Oct 9, 2015. (Update 2.76b is from Nov 3 2015).
- Initial support for Pixar's OpenSubdiv geometry subdivision technology.
- A huge view-port performance boost.
- Big file browser performance boost and arrow keys navigation support.
- Node auto-offset feature that helps organizing node layouts.
- Absolute grid snapping in the 3D view.
- Sculpting with tiled strokes.
- Text effect strips for the sequencer, supporting subtitle export
- As usual, hundreds of bugs fixed and other improvements!
Blender 2.75a release.
- Blender now supports a fully integrated Multi-View and Stereo 3D pipeline
- Cycles has much awaited initial support for AMD GPUs, and a new Light
Portals feature.
- UI now allows font previews in the file browser.
- High quality options for viewport depth of field were added
- Modeling has a new Corrective Smooth modifier.
- The Decimate modifier was improved significantly.
- 3D viewport painting now supports symmetry and the distribution of Dynamic
Topology was improved
- Video Sequence Editor: Placeholders can now replace missing frames of
image sequences
- Game Engine now allows smoother LOD transitions, and supports mist
attributes animation
- And: 100s of bug fixes and smaller feature improvements.
Blender 2.74, released Mar 31 2015!
- Cycles got several precision, noise, speed, memory improvements, new
Pointiness attribute.
- Viewport has new cool compositing features, outliner now manages
orphan datablocks better.
- Modeling now allows custom normals, and transferring data layers
between meshes!
- Massive improvements to hair dynamics and editing tools: a big step
forward with more to come…
- A new tool “Cavity Mask” was added to sculpting/painting, along with
other improvements.
- Great memory consumption optimization in Freestyle NPR stroke rendering.
- Grease pencil and Game engine improvements, and more…
Blender 2.73, released January 8 2015!
- Several Cycles Rendering updates, improvements and new features, support
for GeForce 9xx GPUs.
- New fullscreen mode, improved Pie Menus, 3D View can now display the
world background.
- Knife-tool now allows freehand smart cuts, and more improvements were
made in selection tools, Bevel Modifier and Shapekeys.
- Unwrapping UVs was improved, strength is now enabled for Grab and Snake
Hook brushes, better visual feedback mode for painting with masks.
- Sequencer now can show a backdrop, strips can be snapped to others along
with other improvements.
- Freestyle NPR Rendering has a new SVG exporter add-on, along with other
improvements.
- Grease Pencil had a major update, it is now possible to edit and animate
strokes! New draw styles, and imporvements in user interface.
- Collada Importer was updated, improving the compatibility with other
software’s bone concepts.
- Add-ons: FBX improved importing/exporting armatures, some Python API
changes could need some Add-ons to be updated!
- As usual several other minor updates and improvements, and lot of
bugfixing also in this release.
Blender 2.72, relased Oct 4 2014.
Cycles GPU rendering supports Volume and Subsurface Scattering now. The
User Interface comes with optional Pie Menus now and the Tooltips have been
improved. For Modeling, a new intersection tool has been added in Edit Mode.
Texture painting workflow has been streamlined with easy access to painted
images and UV layers. The Compositor now comes with a Sun Beam node.
Freestyle NPR rendering is now available with Cycles as well.
Changelog:
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.
Cycles Rendering
Cycles now has initial support for volume rendering including emission, absorption and scattering. Volume rendering can be used to render effects like fire, smoke, mist, absorption in glass, and many other effects that can't be represented by surface meshes alone.
CPU rendering performance was improved, particularly for hair, textures and Open Shading Language.
Motion Tracker
Trackers can now be weighted, to keep the result stable as feature disappear or become difficult to track. The plane track workflow was improved to be easier to control. Automatic feature detection was made more robust using a new detector algorithm.
User Interface
The toolbar now has tabs to organize tools in categories. Multiple buttons can now be edited at once, for example for XYZ axes or color channels. Transform tools now have a mode to enter expressions and units. Other changes were done to improve lists, header menus, tooltips, buttons, menus and more.
Modeling
The Laplacian Deform modifier was added to pose a mesh while preserving geometric details of the surface, and a new wireframe modifier allows you transform your mesh into a wireframe representation. The boolean modifier now supports ngons, and there are improvements to the bevel, screw and triangulate modifiers.
The bevel tool now offers more control over the bevel profile and results, and the knife tool was improved as well.
Threaded Dependency Graph
An important change that happened under the hood is the threaded dependency graph. This means that object modifiers and constraints, among other things, can now be computed with multiple threads taking advantage of multicore processors. This will be most noticeable with scenes that have many objects, or multiple objects with heavy modifiers. This is the first step in making the dependency graph in Blender more powerful.
Game Development
The Blender game engine now supports discrete level of detail for meshes. For game developers, support for working with Photoshop PSD files has been added.
A new view navigation walk mode has been added, which has a control scheme as typically found in first person shooter games. This can be useful for game developers to navigate levels as if in a game.
Freestyle NPR Rendering
The Freestyle Python API is an essential part that makes it a highly programmable NPR rendering engine. This API has been reorganized.
More Features
Many small changes and features were done all over Blender. Some notable new feature are normalized display for FCurves, derivative map baking, baking to vertex colors, better visualization of masks and control over mask filling, gravity option for sculpting, negative texture values to support vector displacement and a Lamp Data shading node to create more customized NPR shaders.
Feature Videos
For a visual demonstration of some of the new features in this release, check out the feature videos created during the development of this release.
Addons
Several addons have been added and updated, including Node Wrangler (aka Node Efficiency Tools) and a new Sketchfab Exporter addon
Bug Fixes
In addition to the new features, over 560 bugs that existed in previous releases have been fixed.
upstream or submitted for upstream. Import changes:
A new hidden wire display option was added to help with retopology. Mesh
Bisect is a new tool to cut meshes in half. The Bridge, Edgenet fill,
Grid fill and Symmetrize tools were improved. New curve and lattice
editing tools were added too.
Hair rendering was improved with a new Hair shader and reorganized
settings. Subsurface scattering uses a new sampling algorithm and now
supports bump mapping and texture blurring. Sky rendering now uses a
more accurate sky model. New blackbody, vector transform and HSV nodes
were added. The non-progressive integrator was renamed to Branched Path
Integrator, and is now available for GPU rendering.
The Motion tracker now supports plane tracking, which can be used to
replace billboards, screens and other flat things in footage.
Lists in the user interface can now be resized, sorted and filtered.
Further there are small improvements for vertex parenting, empty
objects, the shrinkwrap modifier, mask editing, armatures, f-curves and
drivers.
FBX Import support has been added and FBX/OBJ can now export split
normals (without the need for the edge split modifier).
In addition to the new features, over 270 bugs that existed in previous
releases have been fixed.
Changes:
This release contains long awaited features like rigid
body physics simulation, dynamic topology sculpting and matcap
display.
Other new features include Cycles hair rendering, support for high
pixel density displays, much better handling of premultiplied and
straight alpha transparency, a vertex bevel tool, a mesh cache
modifier and a new SPH particle fluid dynamics solver.
In detail, see http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.66
* Fix build on NetBSD current, repoted by dholland@
Fix NetBSD version conditional and link to libexecinfo
Changelog:
* More features
* 200 over bug fixes
XXX This revision may build on NetBSD 6.* and Linux only.
* Convert to scons build
* Remove MESSAGE file, we need not to copy files to ~/.blender
Changelog:
* Add cycles engine
* New features and bugfixes
- Fix arbitrary code execution vulnerability in .bend files which contain
a crafted RGBE file (CVE-2008-1102).
- Create various temporary files in safer paths (CVE-2008-1103).
pkgsrc changes:
use cmake rather than SCons to build.
DESTDIR support
2.45
The 2.45 is a bugfix release, to stabilize the 2.4x series.
No new feature have been added, but serious effort has been put in
tracking bugs and fixing them. Some performance issues have also been
addressed.
2.44
This release adds subsurface scattering, improved sculpting tools, ffmpeg
support for additional platforms, a number of animation tool improvements,
and a huge number of Python scripts and API enhancements.
2.43
This release features sculpting meshes that work as if they were clay,
render passes, retopology painting, multi-resolution meshes, texture map
and light map baking, support for multiple uv sets, fast 3D painting,
defocus blur node, multi-layer image read/write, painting in video
sequences, matte, key, and difference composite nodes, a number of
improved 3D animation tools such as proxy objects, walk cycles, simulation
tool improvements for fluid dynamics, hard body dynamics, and cloth and
softbody dynamics. There were also additional compositing and video
editing improvements.
2.42
This release is the result of work done for the Elephants Dream short
film. It includes major feature additions such as node based materials,
node based compositing, a renderer rewrite, improved UV tools, improved
character tools, an array modifier, and a host of other improvements.
Finder, some copying to and from a local buffer in main is done, without
argument checking.
When a web browser or MUA is configured to start Blender automatically,
this might be exploitable to gain priviledges of the current user.
This is related to CVE-2005-3151.
* GLSL pixel and vertex shaders
* Full access to Blenders material capabilities
* Split screen and multi-viewports
* Number of fixes were made to the physics system
* Return of the armature capabilities
* Appending from files does not set the string for "last loaded file". That could give an accidentally save over of used library files.
* International Font support was broken for non-Latin fonts.
* Other fixes
adding a check in configure as I'd like to because it does not have any
AC_CHECK_FUNCS call that I could easily use to do this (the diff could
be quite big).
package, most notably the fact that blender is now Open Source Software, and
we can thus compile it instead of using binary only packages. The new homepage
is http://www.blender.org.
This package tested under NetBSD/i386, NetBSD/macppc and Linux/i386 -- other
platforms are encouraged to test, but hardly any modifications should be necessary.
