Blender 2.73 ships
The Blender Foundation has released Blender 2.73, updating the Grease Pencil tool, adding the first developments from the Project Gooseberry open movie project, and introducing a new full-screen mode.
New 2D animation toolset
The biggest single feature in the release is arguably the updated Grease Pencil tool, which doesn’t sound like that big a deal – until you consider that it’s effectively a 2D animation toolset.
(For proof, see the video above, or For You, Daniel M. Lara’s charming short, which we covered in December.)
New video-editing and UI options
The first R&D work for Project Gooseberry also makes its way into the build, in the shape of the option to show the current frame as a backdrop in the Sequencer, Blender’s built-in video editor.
The Sequencer also gets new snapping and slip-editing options.
The ongoing overhaul of the UI has led to a new fullscreen mode, which minimises on-screen clutter; while the Maya-style pie menus introduced in Blender 2.72 can now be nested.
Other changes include a new SVG exporter for the Freestyle non-photorealistic renderer; better support for Chinese and Japanese text imput; and improvements to the Knife tool and UV and brush editing workflows.
Availability
Blender 2.73 is available now for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.