2.65 is out!

Go get it!

Summary of release:

Blender 2.65 Release Notes

The Blender Foundation and online developer community is proud to present Blender 2.65. We focused on making this the most stable release in the 2.6 cycle yet, fixing over 200 bugs.
Fire simulation was added along with many improvements in smoke simulation. In Cycles, motion blur, open shading language and anisotropic shading support was added. For mesh modeling, the bevel tool was much improved, a new symmetrize mesh tool was added, and new Laplacian smooth, decimate, and triangulate modifiers are available.
[B]Fire & Smoke Simulation[/B]


Fire simulation was added to the Smoke Simulator. The domain received major updates to improve performance and usability. Smoke can be emitted from mesh surfaces, without the need for a particle system. A smoke flow force field was added to improve interaction with other simulations. Colored smoke simulation and mixing is possible and the interaction of smoke with collision objects has been improved.

[B]Cycles Rendering[/B]


Support for writing custom shaders in the Open Shading Language is now available. Motion blur rendering was also added, to make moving objects and cameras appear blurry. There is also an anisotropic shading node, and BSDF nodes can now have different normals, which can be set using the new bump and normal map nodes. Border rendering in the viewport now also works outside of the camera view.

[B]Mesh Modeling[/B]


The bevel tool now includes rounding and was otherwise much improved, preserving the requested bevel width more evenly and generating better topology. A new symmetrize tool was added to make mesh topology and data symmetric.

[B]Modifiers[/B]


The decimator was rewritten, and now preserves UV’s and vertex colors, has an un-subdivide and a mode to dissolve vertices to create planar n-gons. A new laplacian smooth modifier can reduce noise or smooth the mesh while preserving edges and volume. A triangulate modifier was also added, which can be useful for creating game assets with baked normal maps.

[B]More Features[/B]


New features include: a tool transfer vertex weights from one mesh to another, antialiased viewport drawing, connected proportional editing in UV editor, improved DPX file read and write, more control over curve taper, collision masks in the game engine and improved camera title safe drawing.

[B]Addons[/B]


UV texture to vertex color baking was added, the PDB atomic visualization addon was improved, and film response curves were added for the RGB Curves node in the compositor.

[B]Bug Fixes[/B]

In addition to the new features, over 200 bugs that existed in previous releases have been fixed.

What the hell, when did this happen?

Just now :wink:

As someone who mostly uses trunk builds off of graphicall these days, the releases have become less of a big deal and more of just a bookmark that can generally be good to keep on hand due to its increased stability and reduced bug count. Of course, then again, I don’t use a lot of third party addons that don’t come bundled with Blender either so I don’t have the need to stay with the release builds for addon use.

Along with that, I can’t wait to see the inclusion of dyntopo and the non-BGE bullet physics integration which are likely to be committed within a few weeks, the same with the python nodes, which will make for some neat addon possibilities.

still download it… :yes:

Nice splash screen. :yes:

OMG, you guys got OSL working? I tried so hard to get it to work. :slight_smile: You are awesome. edit: nevermind I am stupid! disregard what I said. :stuck_out_tongue:

marcoG_ita, thanks! I thought it was in Converter -> Script as per some early examples and the Script > Script thing threw me off for some reason. Best news ever. :slight_smile:

OSL on windows worked fine, didn’t tested the official 2.65 but pre-release versions were fine!

Downloaded the new 2.65 release, worked fine at first, now when tried to open blender again, crashes every time

Yeah, using trunk i have the feeling that the release of one version is the point when i can start enjoying the new features.

Why doesn’t this new official build load my default settings? Has there been any change in some directory paths the blender uses?

I’m glad for this more stable build.

Did not load mine either, but was no pain to set them up again!

I would say the main reason for Us to stick to the release is stability, but I like to dabble in the trunks to play with new or user added features, something I was never able to do with other software unless I was part of the beta team, gotta love open source software! :slight_smile:

Yes, it uses a separate config directory to 2.64, which was different from 2.63 etc. Easiest is just to save the scene right after start, load it in the new version, and save preferences.

When you load a new blender version there should be a “Copy Previous Settings” on the splash screen.

Just tested and it works here - 64bit linux.

One of the best tools is the transfer of weight paints tool and the bevel. But the rest is also incredible.

copy previous (2.64) settings and rename it 2.65

mine, for example

Thanks to the devs for a super tremendous release. It was worth the bug hunting. Now they’ve made it stable, I hope they will also make it elegant. Plenty of ToDos that aren’t bugs… But first they should get some rest, their work ethic is phenomenal.

Two questions-

What is the difference between the glibc2.11 and 2.7 versions? Is there any reason to upgrade to 2.11 and use that version of Blender or is it all the same with glibc2.7?

Also, there were some bugs reported after the release, namely an OSL compiling crasher (if I understand correctly). Will there be a 2.65a update?

Awesome! Small note: motion blur doesn’t work with scaling for some reason.

Brecht disabled the scaling component of Cycle’s motion blur capability due to difficulties in getting it to work on CUDA, though I do agree somewhat that he could’ve just disabled it for CUDA and just have it work on the CPU, at least until he finds a way to get it to work.

Though Brecht himself thought that few, if anyone would be affected by the disabling because of the fact that there may not be a lot who would need motion blur for this type of transformation, you could try approaching him with use cases where it might be seen as needed.

loaded 2.65 no addons no nothing bare bones, i get object tools in the properties panelmthats it no cycles no nothing aaaaarrrrggggg. i cant be the only one. somebody, any body,i cant be alone. ha (vague movie reference.) any guesses

I have a blend file with dynamic text that becomes blurred in 2.65 but not in 2.64a. I’d upload the file but I cannot find how to attach it.