

The Grease Pencil 2D animation toolset gets two new operators for tweening automatically between a pair of key frames. Grease Pencil gets new tweening and onion-skinning options There is also a new shadow catcher, to help composite rendered 3D objects into live backplates.įinally, for anyone using an AMD GPU, a fair amount of work has been done on Cycles’ implementation of OpenCL, adding support for SSS and volumetrics, and significantly reducing render times. Other changes to Cycles include new Filmic view transform, for better handling of high dynamic ranges than the standard sRGB transform and a False Color transform, which simulates a heat vision effect. It combines multiple material layers into a single ‘ubershader’, making it possible to simulate a wide range of real-world materials, from metal, glass and plastic to car paint and human skin, in a single shader node. The release notes describe the denoiser as a work in progress, so there are still some known issues: in particular, it can’t yet be used for baking, and animations still require high initial sample counts.Īnother key addition is the new PBR shader: an implementation of the Disney principled model used in RenderMan, Arnold, Houdini’s Mantra renderer, and tools like Substance Painter and Unreal Engine. The biggest changes in Blender 2.79 are arguably those to Cycles, which becomes the latest renderer to get a built-in denoising system.ĭenoising enables artists to render using lower quality settings, then remove the resulting noise as a post-process: in theory, leading to a noise-free image more quickly than rendering with higher settings.


The release adds built-in denoising and a new PBR shader to Blender’s Cycles renderer, new animation tools in the Grease Pencil toolset, plus some useful-looking add-ons for motion graphics work.Ĭycles gets denoising system, new PBR shader based on the Disney prinicpled material

The Blender Foundation has released a test build of Blender 2.79: a near-final public version of the next update to the open-source 3D modelling and animation software. Scroll down for news of the official release.
