Today the Blender Foundation announced the release of Blender 2.79. Other than a load of bug fixes, there isn’t actually a ton in the release directly for game developers. Perhaps the biggest feature is the new PBR shader node, implemented as the Principled BSDF node based on Disney’s PBR implementation in Renderman. Other new features include Denoise is a new feature for removing rendering noise, a new Filmic view transform has been added for more photorealistic rendering results, improved OpenCL performance as well as various Cycles renderer improvements. The Grease pencil also received several improvements in this release including per layer onion skinning and new interpolation tools.
Perhaps the single best improvement of this release to me personally is automatic DPI scaling. This means Blender will automatically detect if you are using a high DPI monitor and adjust it’s UI accordingly. No more having to manually change the user interface each time you plug in an external monitor!
The 2.79 release also includes a ton of new add-ons, including:
Dynamic Sky, Archipack, Magic UV, Mesh Edit Tools, Skinify, Display Tools, Brush Menus, Btrace, Is Key Free, Turnaround Camera, Auto Mirror, Camera Rigs, Snap Utils Line, Add Advanced Objects, Export Paper Model, Kinoraw Tools, Stored Views, Render Clay, Auto Tracker, Refine Tracking Solution, Materials Library VX, Mesh Tissue, Cell Fracture Crack It
Be warned however, there was a change to the way add-ons work with data, meaning that backward .blend compatibility may be impacted!
To read more details of this release check the full release announcement available here. If you are interested in learning Blender, we have a ton of great tutorials available here.