14 DAY TRIAL // The Blender Foundation, the developer of Blender, an integrated 3D creation software suite, has just announced that a new version of the application, 2.73, has been released and it's packed with a lot of interesting new features.
Blender is a very powerful application that is used in all kind or professional projects, so each new update that gets released is looked upon with great interest. The same can be said about the current iteration because it improves features like Volume Rendering and it provides support for a new class of video cards from NVIDIA.
As usual, versions like this one are mostly composed of fixes and smaller changes. It can be considered a maintenance release, but if we take a closer look at the changelog, we'll notice that it’s a little bit more than that.
Installing the new version on your Linux system is not easy
It's a great tool and there is no doubt about it. It has no real competition on the Linux platform, but it's also a complex piece of technology and it would be hard to have binary files.
The makers of Blender said that "A major upgrade was given to the Grease Pencil tool, which inter alia brought the ability to edit and animate strokes. The first developments from the Gooseberry Project like a Sequencer Backdrop, Cycles viewport world background and others were added. Cycles got various improvements and speedups, as well as support for cameras inside volumes, the UI got a new 'minimalistic' fullscreenmode and Input Method Editor support for textbuttons (used for complex Chinese and Japanese character input), the Knife-tool was improved, Freestyle got a SVG exporter, and many more features."
Because there are no binary files, you will either have to compile it yourself or wait until it hits your repositories. A complete list of changes and updates can be found in the official changelog.
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