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Blender 2.37a
| A lengthy 5 months development time... so a release packed with interesting new features and improvements! The most noteworthy additions are the Soft Body system, the new incremental Subdivision Surface code, and the full recode of the internal Transformation system, allowing much more control and flexibility.
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| Even with careful testing and uploading pre-release binaries, we got our share of bugs reported... with over 100,000 downloads in the first week of release, nothing can beat testing on that level!
Fortunately only two issues could be noted as real bad bugs that absolutely required an update release. Most of the other fixes are part of our standard maintenance anyway.
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| New Transformation options include; To Sphere, Push/Pull, TrackBall, advanced constraint options, Proportional editing with connection mode, ...
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| As result of the Transformation Tools recode, we can now finally add widgets to have easy access to (constrainted) translation, rotation and scaling. Widgets can be aligned global, local to Objects and to normals in Edit Mode as well.
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| Each Object in Blender now can get a "Soft Body" effect applied. Once applied, the softbody system converts vertex locations to free moving particles... great for animating flexible objects, for wriggling skin and even for cloth simulations.
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| Especially for Soft Body a new force field, Wind, has been added. Also deflections (collisions) are possible between soft objects and Meshes.
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| Best feature of Daniel Dunbar's new "CCG" SubSurf system is its tremendous speed improvement. This mostly thanks to detecting incremental changes while editing. Also creases and UV texture support has been improved.
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| Blender now supports transparent rendering with filtering, by use of a new method which uses both Alpha and Filter combined. Ray-traced images now also deliver correct a alpha layer.
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| Three more options in the render core. Owners of dual CPU systems can now render twice as fast! Color definition internally is full 4x32 bits (was 4x16) and the ortho render code was refreshed.
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| The new Timeline window allows access to all animation timing features, with non blocking animation playback. Edit keys, materials or Soft Body while it moves!
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| Another long list of new features in the Python API, with new modules and advanced integration of scripts in the Blender Window system using "Space Handlers".
With a special thanks to Jacques Guignot, we've dedicated this release to him.
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| New Python Armature options, Z-offset materials, and SDL support for Joysticks.
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| Creating full pages with logs per new feature would postpone the release another month. So check this page for a full listing of all new features in 2.37.
(Image from blender3d.org gallery, Sacha Goedegebure)
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| In the past 5 months, over 600 reports were handled. Still, the total amount of open issues for Blender is less than thirty at the moment of release, quite impressive!
(Image from blender3d.org gallery, Alex Cope)
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Important notesNew TimeLine window isn't upward compatible... that means that older Blender releases crash on reading files with a TimeLine window active. This crash has been fixed in 2.37 to not happen again when we add new window types, but that won't help older versions. :)
Yafray: Support was added for options for the upcoming release of Yafray. At this moment we're still waiting for that... documents will be published later too.
Development notes- OSX XCode project files added in cvs
- BIG warning hunt with 100s of fixes.
- Cleanup of ImBuf code
- Added FTGL to extern/ modules
- Added texture draw support for icons, not used yet
- openEXR preparations were uncommitted and postponed to next release
- cleanup of wrong inclusion of BLI_winstuff.h in files. NOTE: BLI_winstuff.h was meant to be a wrapper around windows.h to handle undefining various crap that windows.h defines.
- Mesh drawing code now is abstracted with the DerivedMesh system. Check blenkernel/intern/.
- use the BLI_string functions! in blenlib/BLI_blenlib.h
- First implementation for dependency graph solving added. Now only used to sort the object list in Scenes, for correct order of evaluation.
- Makefile changes for future support of 64 bits compile, testing with SGI Prism.
- Makefile fixes for Windows Cygwin compiling. Improved dependency checking.
- Tests were done with adding the ZBlur option in render core. Results of this method are very limited and too unsatisfying. Was commented out, and will be moved as built-in option in the Sequencer.
Hidden stuff
- Code was added for testing the pickle matrix
- Try (Button in Render Buttons, Animation panel) to set "rt" to 52 before entering EditMode on subdivision subsurface
- Try rt=2 or 3... rotate manipulator goodies.
CreditsPeople who have contributed code for this release:
Alexander Ewering (Bug hunting & fixes)
Alfredo de Greef (Yafray export)
Andrea Weikert (Bug fixes)
Brecht van Lommel (UV editing)
Campbell Barton (Mesh stats drawing, Python fixes)
Chris Burt (Textures, bug fixes)
Chris Want (Makefiles, bug fixes, Irix, Tuhopuu sync)
Daniel Dunbar (CCG Subsurf, Mesh drawing recode)
DJCapelis (Linux release)
Gergely Erdelyi: (Python fixes)
Hans Lambermont (FreeBSD release)
Jean-Luc Peurriere (Dependency graph, code cleaning, OSX)
Jens Ole Wund (Soft Body, fields)
Joseph Gilbert (Python API)
Jiri Hnidek (Meta Objects, TimeLine)
John Aughey (Turn table)
Johnny Matthews (Mesh tools, Python)
Joilnen Leite (Python API)
Jorge Bernal and Jonathan Merritt (WardIso & Minneart shaders)
Ken Hughes (Python API)
Kent Mein (Imbuf, Sun Solaris)
Kester Maddock (Game engine)
Matt Ebb (TimeLine, menus)
Martin Poirier (Transform recode, constraints)
Nathan Letwory (Scons, bug fixes)
Ricki Myers (Text editor)
Rob Haarsma (UI Texture font, Quicktime)
Simon Clitherow (bug fixes, Windows)
Stefan Gartner (Linux PPC)
Stephen Swaney (Python API)
Tom Musgrove (Extrude menu)
Ton Roosendaal (Render, Soft Body, TimeLine, bug fixes)
Willian Padovani Germano (Python API)
And of course thanks to those who helped with demos, testing, docs, bug hunting, webpages, bug reports, testing builds, and so on... great work all!
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