3D software Blender 2.73 animated drawings – Heise News Ticker

While the developer of the open source 3D package have a couple of big projects in the following version 2.74 moved – this can be seen in the current version 2.73 3D animation films are characterized by hand

Actually, the so-called Grease Pencil is a tool to times to highlight just quickly in the work area of ​​Blender or something. to sketch. For the latest version 2.73 of 3D software’s capabilities have been greatly expanded, so you order now also draw storyboards and this can even animate, as the following example film shows:

Could Grease pencil strokes so far just draw and erase, these can be edited in Blender 2.73 in retrospect, many of the editing mode for 3D surface meshes known functions . are This includes moving, rotating, scaling, bending, shearing, duplicating and mirroring. All these modifications to the bars can also animate. However, one can thereby unable to use no Driver - these are animations that are relative to properties of other objects

So-called Onion Skinning provides animators preview the movement by images are defined by different time points over each other.. In the Onion Skin view of the Grease Pencil can be assigned to each time point different colors; The number of displayed ghost images before and after the current frame can be chosen as well.

Grease Pencil drawings can now be filled with colors, but currently only in the form of the convex hull of a shape. In areas concave shapes are painted over - Pac Man would have to make do without a mouth

Since the grease-pencil strokes have a defined position in 3D space, can also be viewed from a different angle.. So far, they only had two dimensions and therefore were more narrow at a shallower angle until it completely disappeared with exact page view. The new option "Volumetric Strokes" gives the bars a volume, so that they appear from every direction equally wide.

The user interface for the Grease Pencil has also been overhauled and is now more compact and are therefore more clearly, especially during the sorting of the levels. To quickly access the many new features, optional Pie menus have been created, as introduced in the previous version of Blender. These are for the use of the new tools, although not mandatory, but recommended as one approaches quickly reach the functions for common tasks over them.

Rendering with Cycles

Render -Engine Cycles now supports nVidia graphics cards 9xx / Maxwell series and has been improved for volumetric rendering in many places. So also scenes can now be rendered where a camera within a mesh is with volume shaders. Even tracking shots in such a mesh into are now possible. Fire and smoke simulations can now also be interpolated cubic, which at low resolution simulations leads to less blocky results and helps conceal some artifacts of the simulation. The settings can be set individually for each shader

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Comparison rendering time and noise performance of an area light with the new and the old method
Image: wiki. blender.org Homogeneous volume render faster up to 10 percent. The "Quick Smoke" operator less shader nodes are constructed, if only smoke is to be generated, which also brings speed advantages.

Comparison of different "Max bounces" values ​​in a scene with two area lights
Image: wiki .blender.org The new option "Max Bounces" determined in light sources, to what depth the effect of reflection of a lamp is calculated. Area lights now need a little longer to render, but the noise was significantly reduced in return.

Vector Export for line drawings

The results of the Freestyle render engine for non-fotrealistische representations (NPR) can now be exported as vector graphics as an SVG standard format. This feature is available as an add-on that can store both still images and animations as SVG. Animations consist of a series of individual images. Closed contours can be exported with colored filling; there can still be some additional options for a better interaction with the free vector Illustrator Inkscape. The effects of Freestyle modifiers are not yet considered in the SVG export

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A drawing created with Inkscape Open Freestyle
Image: wiki.blender.org The View Map of Freestyle can now keep in memory, making Blender does not have to re-analyze the geometry of the scene at each rendering. This is useful if many test renderings are needed, where you only changed the line style, but not the geometry of the scene. For the concatenation of freestyle lines, there are now two ot her sorting methods. You can specify up to what number of chaining links the lines shall be connected now

video with background Preview

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Backdrop in Video Sequence Editor
Image: wiki.blender.org The Video Sequence Editor has now just like the compositor a Backdrop - can be seen on the background of the workspace can display a preview. Video trips can now be easily placed at the start or end points of other strips. The Slip tool moves the content of a strip, without moving the position itself. Audio strip show on request by default the waveform of the audio signals to - so far you had to choose individually this option for each strip

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The new layout for motion tracking
Image: wiki.blender.org motion tracking uses a new algorithm that estimates based on the movements of a marker, in which area the feature could be the next frame. This limits the search space and thus the computational complexity significantly. The editor layout for motion tracking has been revised and now also shows significantly more editors.

In the 3D working view (viewport) appears and the world, and this is reflected in particular in so far recessed background textures and textures for image-based lighting scenes on request. Both the internal Blender renderer and Cycles offer this world view is being tried in the latter case, reflect the actual settings remotely accurate.

Blender provides each editor when required as full screen complete without menus. If you move your mouse to the top right corner an icon to exit full-screen view appears. In addition, menus can be selected by pressing a shortcut and hide

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The Knife Tool drawn freehand cut
Image: wiki.blender.org <- RSPEAK_START -> The cutting tool! (Knife Tool) separates 3D meshes now also along a drawn freehand line; a double closes the section to form a ring, Fallls possible. For cuts along existing edges Blender selects them automatically, so the result is better to judge in advance

Above the previous function to enlarge a selection, below the new
Image: wiki.blender.org <- RSPEAK_START -> As you zoom in and out of a selection, the selection reserves the quadratic form if you work with an appropriate topology!. The new selection tool "Select Similar Regions" allows the selection of areas that have an identical topology. The size of the land does not matter.

In addition to the changes described numerous smaller functions and detail improvements to the user interface were entered. The developers have also fixed claims to more than 220 bugs

Blender runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux and is now available in version 2.73 available for download. <-.! AUTHOR-DATA MARKER BEGIN -> ( Gottfried Hofmann ) / (pek)

<- RSPEAK_STOP ->