2.66!

Hello everyone as I said last time I have been pretty happy since my laptop has returned to me and I have been making use of all that power to make some nice new 3D things however this week Friday I think the new version of blender was released :D

Oh happy days here's the lovely new splash screen...

Featuring a nice model created by a very good 3D artist who's name is Lucas Falcao he has done some very nice work and I recommend you check out his site here for more of his work!

http://lucasfalcao.wordpress.com/

But anyway back to this update and its features some of which got me pretty excited when I saw them, right of the bat there's been a lot of bug fixes over 250 bugs have been fixed from 2.65 which makes 2.66 the best version of blender to be using at the moment.
Some of the main new features in 2.66 include....

1. Dynamic Typology Sculpting "Dyntopo for short"
2. Support for Rigid body simulations
3. Support for hair rendering in cycles 
4. Vertex Beveling
5. New modifiers such as "Laplacian Smooth" "Shape Enhanced" "UV Warp" Just to name a few.
6. MatCap support
7. And some UI improvements and updates including native retina display support for all you Mac users that have retina displays.

I don't have all the time to go into all these but I will talk about some the ones I am planning on using the most these include "Rigid Body" "Hair rendering" and most likely "Dyntopo" because I am still learning 3D sculpting.

Rigid body's have always been included into Blender however not directly, in any other version if you wanted to do anything with rigid body's you would need make a scene up in the blender game engine then bake it out to key-frames and copy it back into the normal blender scene so you can finalize it.

However now thanks to those wonderful contributors out there you now no longer need to do that long complex process all you need to do is add the rigid body modifier just like the other simulation modifiers e.g. "Fire" "Liquid" "Soft Body" I will not get into great detail on how it works maybe in another post but here is a video showing rigid body in action.

Hair is also another feature I will get around to using in the future, with 2.66 hair now has support in cycles which means you can now render hair in the realistic cycles engine with extreme levels of detail so detailed in fact you can see the single hair strands.

Pretty sweet detail right there, the above image was done by Andrew Price from Blender Guru to show the level of detail achievable with cycles now.

And finally Dyntopo "Dynamic Topology Sculpting" this is a new form of sculpting in Blender that is similar to a method of sculpting in Zbrush called Dynamesh.

Basically what Dyntopo does is it allows the user to quickly add detail to a mesh they are sculpting on without having to worry about maintaining good typology as Blender will add automatically new vertices which will fix any problems in the mesh thus leaving your finished model typology wise perfect.

So thats it for my quick little round up of 2.66 goodies if you want more please go the blender site and read the full patch notes...

http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-266/

Or watch Jonathan Williamson's amazing 2.66 update series on blender cookie

http://cgcookie.com/blender/cgc-series/overview-blender-266/

Till next time.