Blender foundation recently announced 27.8 RC release which has some new features and major improvements over the last release, the release notes are still in progress with refinement for final builds so far it has been great until then let’s have a look at that these changes.
Grease Pencil improved
Grease pencil has come a long way now and has a lot of improvements in this version, it now offers various kinds of brushes as seen in the below
image.
The improvements made in it have turned it into a production-ready alternative to other 2D animation software, allowing users to mix 2D drawings/sketches with 3D objects in a composition makes it greater than ever see it in action in the video below.
GP -“Skull Chaser” Fan art, character by Jake Parker, based on a Anthony Holden anim) by Daniel M. Lara (Pepeland) from psl on Vimeo.
Animation
It’s now even more interesting to animate in Blender with the improvements of Bendy Bones (Advanced B-Bones for Easier + Simple Rigging) which makes it easier for animators to create their own rigs, using fewer bones.
Keyframe Types
Keyframes Types: is also a new feature introduced it helps you separate or categories key in Jitter, Extreme, Breakdown, Keyframe, this becomes a very handy setting because you can now separate your keys with different colours in Dope Sheet as seen in the image below
Alembic
Now Blender finally supports Alembic(.abc) file support this means if you have software like Maya or Nuke in your pipeline compatibility is better.
Supported object types for importing:
- Cameras
- Curves
- Empties (including Maya locators and the likes)
- Meshes
- Points (read as a Mesh object with only vertices)
Supported object and data types while exporting:
- Camera
- Curve
- Hair
- Mesh
- NURBS
- Particles
Better Threading Handling
Blender could render on multi-threads since a long time ago but now support multi-threading in tasks like depsgraph and it can execute several tasks in parallel making it have better performance with CPU that have 8-16 threads.
You can learn more about bugfixes and new features from the release note
If I have missed something let me know or if you would like to share some experience or suggestion over this release leave a comment below,
Thank you for reading.