The Blender Foundation has just released Blender 2.79, the last official version before the huge 2.80 makeover.
New features include:
- Denoiser
- PBR Shader
- Shadow Catcher
- Filmic Color Management
- Faster AMD OpenCL
- Over 700 bugs fixed
- And much more!
For the full features list, see the new and GORGEOUS 2.79 release notes.
From the Blender Foundation press release:
Today the Blender Foundation released Blender 2.79, a highly anticipated update with almost a year of new development. The best highlights are features such as Alembic I/O, improved PBR shaders, "Filmic" color management and fast OpenCL rendering on AMD GPUs.
Blender's free and open source development is blooming as never before; not only thanks to its huge online community, but especially thanks to a dozen full time developers that work on Blender and its Cycles render engine nowadays.
Developers are funded through donations from the Blender Foundation as well as employed by the Blender Institute, but also increasingly by the industry. In the past year development on Blender was funded by companies such as AMD, Intel, Tangent Animation, Nimble Collective, Barnstorm VFX and Aleph Objects.
Blender 2.79 will be the stable Blender release for the year to come, while all development efforts go to making the next big leap for free/open source 3D creation: the highly anticipated Blender 2.8 "Workflow" release!
17 Comments
Did the website crash?! o_o"
It's a big internet hug! :D We're working on it and panicking accordingly.
Thanks Bart for that 'GORGEOUS' :)
Can I claim that the BlenderNation Death Ray still works? %^)
I have been playing around with the RC for a project and it is great. I didn't even know the denoise feature was new and have been using it. Really makes the renders look nice!
Keep it up Blender team!
How to to install the latest version ...should I uninstall the older version first....and how to transfer addon's to the newer version...
it's seamless. You install then at first startup it asks if you want to copy over your last settings. Then exit, restart and your addons are there.
One think problem in blender 2.79.
A.N.T Landscape and some add-on not working 2.79.
This version is a great, great work of the Blender Foundation. Simply amazing and the road map wow! People of all over the world, please support Blender. Thank you !
This is great! Thanks to the Blender team for their hard work! I have been particularly happy with the Principled BSDF shader. Has sped up my Substance Painter > B3D workflow for texturing. Also REALLY love the denoise feature. All of it is outstanding!
+1.
Denoiser, shadow catcher. Would be cool if they'd also work together (alpha noise) :) But those are game changing features anyway. Rendering a few things more without disney/pixar budget now became possible, shadow isolation might not be a nightmare in some cases anymore.
OpoenCL is also great given the new GPU competition.
And a special thanks to bug fixing. A tool can be good only when it actually works.
Also lots of other features so organic I didn't even notice are new!
Thank to the Blender Team! Lots of outstanding features.
thx for the release!
I had a 2,78c Blender version working on my drive (with all my custom shortcuts and addons), and also, I had a 2.79RC version (which took me around a day to set it up with custom stuff), now I dowloaded 2.79 final and installed.
This install erased my 2,78c folder and 2,79 RC version, when I start Blender 2.79 FINAL, the splash screen still shows Release Candidate! and I lost both of my configs!
Working on Win7 x64. Install directory: C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender
Please help me set this up correctly. I get a lot of pain upgrading Blender software on each big release.
Thank you.
2.79 has so many nice features in it. I really, really appreciate the new built in animal rigs with the Rigify addon :D
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Kx3VU2SS2A
Finally its here! can't wait to play around with it. Denoising and filmic will be my top features list in this release. So glad that Blender has them now. This will shake the status quo of the rendering-engines, a bit. :D