Software update: Blender 2.69

Version 2.69 of the open source and cross platform 3D program Blender has been released. This application is intended for 3d modelling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive creation and playback. More information about the extensive possibilities of Blender can be found on this page are being found. This program includes the open source animation movies Elephant’s Dream, Big Buck Bunny, cinder and Tears of Steel made. Below are the release notes for this release.

Blender 2.69

FBX import is now supported, along with improved export. New mesh modeling tools were added and existing ones improved. Cycles subsurface scattering and hair shading were improved, along with the addition of a new sky model, shading nodes and tone mapping in the viewport. The motion tracker now supports plane tracking, to track and replace flat objects in footage.

Modeling
A new hidden wire display option was added to help with retopology. Mesh Bisect is a new tool to cut meshes in half. The Bridge, Edgenet fill, Grid fill and Symmetrize tools were improved. New curve and lattice editing tools were added too.

Motion Tracker
The Motion tracker now supports plane tracking, which can be used to replace billboards, screens and other flat things in footage.

Addons
FBX Import support has been added and FBX/OBJ can now export split normals (without the need for the edge split modifier).

Cycles Render
Hair rendering was improved with a new Hair shader and reorganized settings. Subsurface scattering uses a new sampling algorithm and now supports bump mapping and texture blurring.

Sky rendering now uses a more accurate sky model. New blackbody, vector transform and HSV nodes were added. The non-progressive integrator was renamed to Branched Path Integrator, and is now available for GPU rendering.

Tone mapping now works in the viewport, with photographic film emulation.

More Features
Lists in the user interface can now be resized, sorted and filtered. Further there are small improvements for vertex parenting, empty objects, the shrinkwrap modifier, mask editing, armatures, f-curves and drivers.

Bug fixes
In addition to the new features, over 270 bugs that existed in previous releases have been fixed.