Blender 2.62 gets new UV editing tools

Version 2.62 of the open source Blender 3D content creation suite has been released. New UV Tools including sculpting tools and an advanced interactive stitch tool for aligning and joining UV islands have been added.

Support for render layers and passes is now built in to the Cycles render engine in Blender 2.62; this allows users to split objects in a scene into multiple layers, and split rendered images into colours and direct and indirect light. The update includes a new Remesh modifier tool that can be used to generate new mesh topology by following the curvature of an input surface.

New unwrap options have been added in the toolbar
Source: Blender.org Other changes include improvements to the game engine user interface, new dynamic paint options, support for tracking objects inside of videos, and fixes for more than 200 bugs. The developers also note that the boolean modifier has been updated to use the Carve library and should result in "much improved results" as it is "more stable and faster, resolving old well-known limitations of our previous library".

The 2.62 release is the third in the 2.6x series; the project's developers are currently targeting a new 2.6x branch release every two months and note that "each release is supposed to be stable". According to the release schedule, 2.63 is planned for April 2012, with Blender 2.64 arriving in June 2012 and others to follow.

Further information about the update, including a detailed list of new features, can be found in the release log and release notes. Version 2.62 of Blender is available to download for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and FreeBSD from the project's Get Blender page. Source code for Blender is licensed under the GPLv2 and development is sponsored by the non-profit Blender Foundation based in Amsterdam.

See also:

• Blender 2.61 adds motion tracking support, a report from The H.

(crve)