Cycles now includes support for rendering volume textures, fire and smoke

Jun 27, 2014 10:01 GMT  ·  By

The Blender Foundation is out with a brand-new version of its 3D designer and animator for Mac, Windows, and Linux, adding new features for Cycles rendering, UI tweaks, Modeling enhancements, and some improvements to the Game development component, just to name some key changes.

As usual, the changelog is miles long, so we’ll just focus on the major changes.

New features in Blender 2.71 for Cycles renderer include deformation motion blur, fire/smoke and volume rendering, as well as a baking API (application programming interface).

Thanks to a few UI tweaks, users can now drag popups and resize preview widgets. Now with “easing equations” presets, Animation has new interpolation types. “Split normals” is now allowed in Modeling, and Sculpting/Painting has new HSL color wheel and constant detail in dyntopo, according to the developers.

As far as Game development is concerned, it now allows deactivating logic bricks, multi-threaded animations, cast only materials and “unlimited” action layers. Users will find a new textured strokes feature in Freestyle NPR rendering, along with line sorting options.

The updates carried out to Cycles Rendering are probably the most important ones. According to the developers, “Cycles now includes support for rendering volume textures, fire and smoke, deformation motion blur, baking textures from cycles materials, more texture interpolation modes and a dedicated UV layer node.”

Download Blender 2.71 for Mac OS X

Download Blender 2.71 for Windows

Download Blender 2.71 for Linux