Blender 2.73 released

Cycles rendering

• Volume Rendering:
  • Rendering with cameras inside volume meshes is now supported
  • Cubic voxels interpolation is a new option helping to avoid artifacts on low resolution smoke simulations
  • Faster rendering of homogeneous volumes
• Support for GeForce 9xx GPUs
• Improved rendering with area lights
• Viewport specularity for the viewport is now also implemented for Cycles

User Interface

• A new fullscreen mode without any buttons or other "annoying" elements to improve the UI
• The 3D View got an option to display the world background right from the viewport
• Pie Menus:
  • Confirm Threshold to confirm a pie menu without releasing the original key
  • Nested Pie Menus (a Pie Menu within a Pie Menu) are now supported

Chinese and Japanese complex character input

Modeling

• Knife-tool:
  • Cuts can now be created using free-hand drawing
  • Cut-loops can now be closed by double click
• Selection:
  • A new selection method "Select Similar Regions" was added
  • You can now skip adjacent faces while using the select more/less function

Sculpting/Painting

• Texture Painting:
  • The Add Simple Uvs operator for texture painting now uses a simpler unwrap method for better quick UV layouts
  • Face-mask edges are now hidden to give proper visual feedback while working with masks
• Brushes:
  • Changing brush size, detail size and strength can now be done using numeric keyboard input
  • Brush strength can now also be changed for Grab and Snake Hook brushes

Sequencer

• A Backdrop similar to Compositor is now implemented for the Sequencer as well
• Strips:
  • Strips can now be snapped to other strip's start- and endpoints
  • A new slip Tool allows moving content within the strip itself

Freestyle NPR Rendering

• Freestyle got a new SVG exporter, implemented as an add-on
• View maps can now be cached
• More options for chain selection and chain sorting were added

Animation

• Grease Pencil (which got a major upgrade)
• It is now possible to edit and animate strokes
• New draw styles were added, e.g. filled stroke interiors, volumetric strokes
• The Grease Pencil's user interface (which is now completely defined via Python) has gotten a general overhaul
• Two quick access pie menus were added
• Graph Editor:
  • Revised the set of operators for showing/hiding curves from the keyframe area
  • Circle selection for Curves was added

Add-ons

• Collada Importer:
  • Importing rigs previously caused problems with leaf bones (end bone of a bone chain) so a fix was created for that.
  • Added an experimental bonechain Finder to predict the longest possible chains of connected bones.
• The FBX Add-on now uses some advanced handling/tweaking options for importing and exporting armatures
• The Copy and Paste Add-on is now using version 2.0

• Download Blender 2.73 from www.blender.org.
• Read more: Blender 2.73 relase notes.