July 15, 2006
For Immediate Release

Blender 2.42, the "Orange" version released.

After the character animation upgrade of the past release, this final "Orange" release focuses mainly on the render pipeline. The blender.org team has been very busy meeting the imaging requirements for the Elephants Dream movie and this has resulted in a big boost of development. Especially the design of a tight integrated multi-layer multi-pass HDR renderer with the new Compositing system has proven to be crucial for a productive studio environment. An artist can setup complex shots consisting of many scenes, which each should render multiple layers and passes, define how the compositing should happen, and still have everything bundled in a single compact Blender file to hand over to a render farm to execute with a single command.

The compositing system also supports a novel approach for vector-based motion blur, which reconstructs the final image (using depth values) into a 3d model - one polygon per pixel - and by deforming the 3d model with per pixel motion vectors it can accumulate efficiently good looking motion blur effects.

The shortlist of 2.42 features:
 
- A completely rewritten render pipeline, which now is rendering in full HDR, tile-based and threaded, supporting advanced preview renders, layer-rendering and pass render, with a tight integration to the compositor. 
 
- Added a Node based Materials editing for creating advanced shaders. The Node Shader editor allows to use both traditional Materials, as to construct more low level shader effects. New built-in shaders include anisotropic and fresnel. 

- The new HDR Compositor allows powerful imaging manipulations, using still frames or animation input, or directly hooking up with intermediate results of the rendering pipeline. Support for cropped previews allow for near-realtime editing of movie sized frames with dozens of compositing nodes.
 
- Support for industry standard exchange format like OpenEXR, Cineon, DPX and Collada.
 
- The already topnotch LSCM (UV) unwrapper was further expanded to ABF++, which means unwrapping is now more automatic with less stretching, interactively updated while editing. A minimize stretch tool was added for local adjustments.
 
- The Game Engine was greatly expanded, and now makes full use of the new Bullet physics library.
 
- The Blender Video Sequence editor now allows to edit unlimited amounts of images and videos, became full HDR images aware,  and - for Linux only now - supports FFMPEG with a large range of codecs for audio and video.
 
- Hundreds of bugs were mercyless hunted and killed.
 
The official release logs, with images and examples, can be found here:
http://www.blender.org/cms/Blender_2_42.727.0.html
The main download page with all versions:
http://www.blender.org/cms/Blender.31.0.html

Note: Artists from the Elephants Dream team will demonstrate the 2.42 release on the Siggraph Convention, on sunday in theatre room 213, and for three days in the Open Source Pavilion on the trade show.

Ton Roosendaal
Blender Foundation