It’s been quite a wait, but Blender 2.78 is finally here and it brings us all kinds of great new features. There are new add-ons, render for VR functionality, viewport performance improvements, freehand curves on surfaces, new B-Bones and a great deal more in this release.
From the release announcement:
The Blender Foundation and online developer community are proud to present Blender 2.78, released September 30th 2016! This release aims to be a very stable one, so that developers can focus better on Blender 2.8 work. Here are some of the highlights:
- Spherical Stereo images rendering support for VR
- Grease Pencil is now a full 2D drawing & animation tool!
- Viewport Rendering improvements
- New Freehand curves drawing over surfaces!
- Bendy Bones, powerful new options for B-Bones
- Alembic support: import/export basic operators
- Cloth Physics: new Dynamic Base Mesh and Simulation Speed option
- New Add-ons, individual preferences, Python APIs changes, and a lot of new & updated add-ons!
- Many more features, improvements and the usual huge bug-fixes list
You can read more about this release here, there is a ton more to this release than the list above. I took a look at using one of the new plug-ins, Archimesh, for level design last month. You can check that out here or embedded below.