X-Blender Portable Changelog

What's new in X-Blender Portable 2.79b [rev14]

Jan 12, 2019

This corrective release only fixes a few serious bugs/regressions introduced in 2.79a fixes.

New in X-Blender Portable 2.78 [rev14] (Oct 7, 2016)

HIGHLIGHTS:
Cycles: Cycles now supports rendering spherical stereo images for VR.
Grease Pencil: Reworked to be similar to other 2D drawing softwares.
Alembic: Initial basic support in Blender.
Improvements to Bendy Bones for Easier and Simpler Rigging.
Eleven new add-ons.
And: 100s of bug fixes and other improvements!
Grease Pencil:
New design and complete overhaul, including:
Easy layer management.
Ability to have multiple colors and thickness values per layer.
Stroke quality improvements.
Different color saturation in the same stroke.
Improved Fills - Support for Concave Shapes.
Parenting a layer to any object, armature or bone.
Alembic:
Initial implementation in Blender.
Basic Alembic support through import and export operators.
Data streaming through cache constraints and modifiers.
Cycles Renderer:
Rendering spherical stereo images for VR is now supported.
Multiscatter GGX mode for the glossy and glass BSDF nodes.
Experimental feature: Improved Subdivision and Displacement system.
Vertex color, weight and normal support for point density textures.
Hair rendering speed up / memory use improvements.
OpenCL devices now support float4 textures (e.g. HDR textures).
Added support for NVidia GTX 1060, 1070, 1080 GPUs.
User Interface:
Improvements to the Eyedropper and Operator Search.
Additional drawing mode for the Waveform Scope in the Image Editor.
Defining ranges and individual render frames in the Command Line.
Modeling:
New Freehand Curve drawing tool.
New Dissolve tool.
New Fill Region tool for Selection.
Improvements to Decimation, Bevel.
Edit-mode undo memory usage has been optimized.
Viewport & Render:
More supported shading nodes and options for the Cycles viewport render.
Additional shading features for the Blender GLSL viewport.
Blender Render shading can now also be computed in world space.
Animation:
Improvements to Bendy Bones for Easier and Simpler Rigging.
Numerous changes to streamline the process of setting up and editing drivers.
The type of keyframe can be chosen on insertion.
Support non-uniform scaled bones failing with IK solver.
Datablocks & Libraries Management:
A new core low-level feature for datablocks management, called 'ID remapping'.
Currently it allows from the Outliner:
In the Blender File view to Reload and Relocate libraries.
In All Scenes, Current Scene and similar views to Fully Delete or Remap a datablock.
Physics:
The rest shape of cloth can now be animated.
Cloth Simulation Speed is now adjustable.
Collision Groups for Particles and Soft Body.
Add-ons:
11 new add-ons are included in this release.
Numerous improvements and fixes to existing add-ons.
Removed Import: MakeHuman (.mhx) (format not supported anymore in MakeHuman).
New Preferences Individual Activation.
Changes to the Python API functions.
Bug Fixes:
As for every Blender release, hundreds of bugs were fixed, thanks to the hardworking Blender developers.

New in X-Blender Portable 2.67b [rev14] (Jun 3, 2013)

New in X-Blender Portable 2.67a [rev14] (May 31, 2013)

New in X-Blender Portable 2.63 [rev13] (May 10, 2012)

New in X-Blender Portable 2.58 [rev11] (Jun 30, 2011)

New in X-Blender Portable 2.57.0 r36147 (Apr 22, 2011)

User Interface:
Updated GUI:
Blender 2.5 has a new GUI layout, with updated graphic design and a new icon set. The GUI layout has been re-designed to be clearer, better organised and easier to navigate, and is fully customisable with Python scripting. Other improvements include a new file browser, customisable tool shelf and more.
Add-ons:
In Blender 2.53 we've implemented a new method for extending Blender with Python Scripts. These now are being distributed and stored as 'Add-ons" which you can choose to enable or disable each individually. This helps to keep the interface clean and well organized.
Check out the complete Add-on repository.
And the changelog for Add-on scripts.
Custom keyboard shortcuts
Blender 2.5 has been designed from scratch to enable users to configure their own keyboard shortcuts. Key definitions are be grouped in "key maps", and each map can be fully customized and saved. Keymaps can also be configured for special input methods such as directional gestures and tweak events, any-key modifiers, or multi-key input.
Internal Architecture:
Data access:
Now all internal data in a .blend scene file, from individual vertices, to inter-object relations, to composite node UI positions, is fully accessible with a consistent system. This enables UI controls, Python Scripting API, the animation system and more, to access and edit all scene data consistently, while providing richer interaction and feedback such as contextual help, in-place keyframing and driver expression editing, and real world units of measurement.
64 bits:
This required a full recode of the low level windowing library to support Cocoa, which is good news for Blender's future on Macs in general!
Tool system:
An "Operator" is the new generalized definition of a tool in Blender. This ranges from file load/save, UI layout management to adding and editing objects and its data. Because the Operator is generic, it can be called uniformly by hotkeys, menus, buttons, or via Python. Operators can be searched, chained (macros) and can provide interactive editing with real-time updates.
Python Scripting:
Blender 2.5 has a full re-implemented Python Scripting API. Anything a user can interact with via the UI - data, options and tools - is also available for scripters now. Scripts are being used for Importers/Exporters, for custom tools ("Operators"), for access to other render engines, and for extending the UI in various ways.
For the next 2.58 release the API will be completed with access to internal notifiers and events to track data changes or UI refreshes.
Modeling:
Sculpt and Multi-resolution:
Sculpt mode in Blender has been optimized, increasing drawing and editing performance significantly, and reducing memory usage to support more detailed models. New tools have been added and existing ones improved. Multiresolution meshes have also been rewritten, now available as a modifier to integrate better with the animation system, and preserving displacements when editing the mesh topology.
Paint Brushes:
Blender's method of accessing brushes for painting tasks has been updated and streamlined. Brushes store all paint-related settings, such as size, strength, tool type, textures and influence curve, and can be switched between in the brush list box or with shortcut keys. As well as the preset brushes included with Blender, you can also save your own, and assign your own shortcut keys to them.
Sculpt Brush and Stroke Upgrade:
In Blender 2.54 Beta the focus has been on bug fixing and stabilizing the scripting API in the form of a renaming operation to unify naming and changes to property creation and access.
Solidify Modifier:
Blender 2.5 now includes a Solidify modifier, used to non-destructively add thickness to thin meshes (similar to 'shell' modifiers in other applications). Solidify allows you to model a simple thin mesh surface, and have a solid thickness automatically extruded by the modifier.
Animation System:
F-Curves, Actions, NLA:
One of the 2.5 specs is "make everything animatable". The implications of this didn't make it easy to just port things over, so a couple of important redesigns were needed: Individual properties are animated with F-curves, grouped into actions, and can be instanced and layered and mixed non-destructively in the NLA editor. Effects such as noise and enveloping can be added to animation curves and NLA clips with F-curve modifiers.
Spline IK:
Spline IK is a constraint which aligns a chain of bones along a curve. It is particularly well suited for rigging flexible body parts such as tails, tentacles, and spines, as well as inorganic items such as ropes.
Animation Editors:
The animation editors have had a complete refresh in Blender 2.5 with a new graph editor, supporting multiple objects and F-curves simultaneously, a scene-wide dopesheet, a redesigned Non-Linear Animation editor and new functionality for shape animation, driver, expressions and keying sets.
Physics:
Smoke Simulation:
Blender 2.5 includes a new fluid-based smoke simulation engine. Alongside this is capability to scale up a low-resolution sim, maintaining detail with wavelet turbulence. Smoke can be generated by input particle motion, and can be affected by colliding obstacles and force fields. The smoke data is output as voxels, which can be rendered as a volume.
Particles:
Particle systems have had a refresh, now taking advantage of fully interactive animation playback and editing. New additions include particle path editing with brush tools, a new point caching system, new boids physics and hair dynamics using cloth simulation.
Rendering:
Volume Rendering:
Blender 2.5 includes a volume material, intended for rendering particles and gases such as smoke, clouds, and fire. All procedural textures are supported as data sources, as well as two new textures for rendering voxels (such as smoke sims) and point clouds. Various shading options are available from wispy mist-like volumes, to physically based scattering and self-shadowing.
Ray tracing optimization:
As part of the google summer of code, the ray trace acceleration system has had a complete overhaul, making it significantly more efficient and with support for new features such as instancing. Now multiple BVH based acceleration structures are available, in artists' terms, rendering some scenes up to 10x faster!
Color management:
Blender 2.5 includes a first version of Color Management. Currently this is limited to ensuring Linear Workflow during the render pipeline - gamma corrected inputs are linearized before rendering, the renderer and compositor work in linear RGB color space, and is gamma corrected back to sRGB color space for display in the image editor.
Future work may include support for display profiles, LUTs, and finer grained control over input/output conversions.
Other rendering features:
Additional rendering features in 2.5 improved bump mapping and image texture filtering, an initial version of deep shadow maps, color management (integrated linear workflow).
More new features, that still needs to be documented on this page:
Installation paths and OS conventions
Windows version: Blender now starts with Command Prompt hidden
External Render Engine API
Python interactive console.
Scopes Display in the Image Editor
Non-blocking Reports in top header
Screw Modifier
Fluid Particles
Network Render
Game Engine Mode in UI
Approximate Indirect Light
Improved sequencer core: it's faster and needs less memory
GameLogic/Audaspace GSoC project merged
load binary data as .blend from memory
Installer for Windows installs since 2.56 in %USERPROFILE% by default
COLLADA support has been stabilized considerably, with improvements to mesh, material, light and node structures
BVH Motion Capture Export
SVG Vector Graphics Import
Blend file thumbnails for Windows and Gnome Desktop Environment.