The Blender Foundation have provided another release of Blender recently, bringing Blender up to version 2.64, which sees additions to the motion tracking capabilities of Blender, as well as some new compositing features, mask editing features, and a host of changes and additions into Cycles, Blender’s physical rendering engine.
The focus was on creating a full VFX pipeline, with improved motion tracking using a planar tracker, easier green screen keying, and a new mask editor. A new tile based compositing system was added, along with more advanced color management
Not an uncommon phrase to hear might be “Blender is pretty good for being free”, which is partly true. Expanding on that premise and taking the “free” component out of the equation the phrase still holds true, Blender is maturing into a great application that is capable of some pretty high end things.
Blender development has partly been fueled by Open Source Short Film Projects, at least this is true of the last four releases and this release was fostered in the fabrication of Tears of Steel, which had the focus to add and refine a full VFX Pipeline into Blender.
This was the main driving concept behind things like completely changing and creating a new Compositing Nodes backend with a new tiled based compositor which provides better feedback while editing and using less memory in the process. New nodes were also added for masks, color correction and bokeh blur.
Keeping along the lines of a full VFX production Pipeline, Blender as also received some mask editor features with the ability to create masks directly in the image and movie clip editor, significant improvements to Motion Tracking, Green Screen Compositing nodes, speed improvements to the sequencer, as well as some updates to the Blender Game Engine, to briefly name a few. For the full list of changes, improvements and features to Blender 2.64, check the page at Blender.org here.