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Blender 2.67 for Mac OS X

Developer: Blender Foundation
Last updated: May 7, 2013
License: Freeware
OS Support: Mac OS X
File Size: 68.1 MB
Downloads: 3,433
∟ Last week: 10
User Rating:    (10 votes)
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Open source 3D modeling software.

Blender is an open source software for 3D modeling, rendering, animation, post-production, interactive creation and playback. Available for Windows, Linux, Irix, Sun Solaris, FreeBSD or Mac OS X.

Modeling

  • A range of 3D object types including polygon meshes, NURBS surfaces, bezier and B-spline curves, metaballs, vector fonts (TrueType, PostScript, OpenType)
  • 'Smooth proxy' style catmull-clark subdivision surfaces
  • Boolean mesh functions
  • Editing functions such as extrude, bevel, cut, spin, screw, warp, subdivide, noise, smooth Soft selection editing tools for organic modeling
  • Python scripting access for custom tools

Animation

  • Armature (skeleton) deformation with forward/inverse kinematics, auto skinning and interactive 3D paint for vertex weighting
  • Non-linear animation mixer with automated walkcycles along paths
  • Constraint system
  • Vertex key framing for morphing, with controlling sliders
  • Character animation pose editor
  • Animatable lattice deformation
  • 'Ipo' system integrates both motion curve and traditional key-frame editing
  • Audio playback, mixing and editing support for sound synchronisation
  • Python scripting access for custom and procedural animation effects

Realtime 3D/game creation

  • Graphical editor for defining interactive behavior without programming
  • Collision detection and dynamics simulation
  • Python scripting API for sophisticated control and AI, fully defined advanced game logic
  • Supports all OpenGL™ lighting modes, including transparencies, Animated and reflection-mapped textures
  • Playback of games and interactive 3D content without compiling or preprocessing
  • Audio, using the fmod toolkit
  • Multi-layering of Scenes for overlay interfaces

Rendering

  • Very fast inbuilt raytracer
  • Integral support for the famous Yafray render engine
  • Oversampling, motion blur, post-production effects, fields, non-square pixels
  • Environment maps, halos, lens flares, fog
  • Various surface shaders such as Lambert, Phong, Oren-nayar, Blinn, Toon
  • Edge rendering for toon shading
  • Procedural Textures
  • Ambient Occlusion
  • Radiosity solver
  • Export scripts available for external renderers such as Renderman (RIB), Povray, Virtualight
  • UV texture editor with various mesh unwrap modes

Interface

  • Flexible user configurable window layout
  • Powerful object-oriented data system
  • Anti-aliased fonts with international translation support
  • Windows for animation curves/keys, schematic scene diagram, non-linear video sequence editing, character animation action editor, non-linear animation mixer, image/UV editing, file/image selection and file management
  • Inbuilt text editor for annotations and editing Python scripts
  • Consistent interface across multiple platforms

Files

  • Save all scene data in a single .blend file
  • .blend format supports compression, digital signatures, encryption, forwards/backwards compatibility and can be used as a library to link to from other .blend files
  • Read / Write TGA, JPG, PNG, Iris, SGI Movie, IFF, AVI and Quicktime GIF, TIFF, PSD, MOV (Windows and Mac OS X)
  • Native import and export for DXF, Inventor and VRML files, with python scripts available for many other 3D formats
  • Create stand-alone executables containing interactive 3D content or play back with the 3d web browser plugin

Fire and Smoke

Fire simulation was added to the Smoke Simulator. The domain received major updates to improve performance and usability. Smoke can be emitted from mesh surfaces, without the need for a particle system. A smoke flow force field was added to improve interaction with other simulations. Colored smoke simulation and mixing is possible and the interaction of smoke with collision objects has been improved.

Mesh Modeling

The bevel tool now includes rounding and was otherwise much improved, preserving the requested bevel width more evenly and generating better topology. A new symmetrize tool was added to make mesh topology and data symmetric.

More Features

New features include: a tool transfer vertex weights from one mesh to another, antialiased viewport drawing, connected proportional editing in UV editor, improved DPX file read and write, more control over curve taper, collision masks in the game engine and improved camera title safe drawing.

Cycles Render

Support for writing custom shaders in the Open Shading Language is now available. Motion blur rendering was also added, to make moving objects and cameras appear blurry. There is also an anisotropic shading node, and BSDF nodes can now have different normals, which can be set using the new bump and normal map nodes.

Modifiers

The decimator was rewritten, and now preserves UV's and vertex colors, has an un-subdivide and a mode to dissolve vertices to create planar n-gons. A new laplacian smooth modifier can reduce noise or smooth the mesh while preserving edges and volume. A triangulate modifier was also added, which can be useful for creating game assets with baked normal maps.

What's New:

The Blender Foundation and online developer community is proud to present Blender 2.67. New in this release is the Freestyle render engine for non-photorealistic rendering, which can generate 2D line drawings in various styles.

The paint and sculpt system is now much more consistent across different paint modes and has gained various new features. Motion tracking was made faster, and Cycles now has initial support for subsurface scattering.

The node system now support more flexible group editing. For developers of external render engine addons it is now possible to support node based materials.

For 3D printing an addon was added to analyze and export the meshes.

Freestyle

Freestyle is a new non-photorealistic (NPR) rendering engine integrated into Blender. Originally developed as a stand-alone program in an academic research project, Freestyle provides artists with a new tool set for generating 2D line drawing out of a given 3D scene prepared with Blender. Generated lines can be stylized by a variety of stylization options for tweaking line color, alpha transparency, line thickness, and line geometry.

Motion Tracker

Camera and object motion solver motion are much more accurate and faster because the Ceres library is used now for the bundle adjustment step. In addition the tripod solver is finally fixed and has become usable for longer footage. Smaller fixes were done as well.

3D Printing

An addon to help with 3d printing is now bundled as well as a new ruler tool and mesh-analysis display attributes such as thickness, sharp-areas and distortion.

Cycles Render

A Subsurface Scattering shader is now available, to create materials such as Wax, Marble or Skin. Minimum pixel width was added to hair rendering and several performance improvements have been made, to render scenes without hair or motion blur faster. The OSL shading system received performance improvements as well.

Paint System

The stroke system and brush texture access has been unified and as a result there are many more tools now shared across paint modes. Brush angle control, better brush overlays, separate texture control for alpha and a brand new stencil mapping mode with direct mouse control have been implemented. Many improvements and bug fixes have also been made.

Compositing

Added border for compositor viewer node, which restricts what is to be composited for faster previews. Also border rendering and cropping are finally working as expected. Some optimization was done as well.

Node Editor

Node Groups editing is less cluttered and more consistent with other nodes. Multiple node editor windows can be used independently. Nesting node groups is fully supported. Pinning is supported as well in the node editor to disable context switching.

Python Nodes

The API now supports custom node types. Nodes can be defined and registered in python scripts like other UI classes. This allows the creation of entire new node systems for addons, external render engines and the like.

Tools

New mesh modeling tools: Individual Face Inset, Poke Face and Knife Project. Faster image display in the image and movie clip editors. Better support for UTF-8 text in the text and console editors, and various improvements to other editors.

Addons

New addons are the node efficiency tools and VRML2 export.

Bug fixes

In addition to the new features, over 260 bugs that existed in previous releases have been fixed.

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